The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] When leaving thy body behind thee thou soarest up into the ether,
Then thou becomest a god, immortal, beyond the power of death.

In this utterance of Empedocles (cf. p. 46) is epitomized what the ancient Egyptians thought about the eternal clement in man and its connection with the Divine. Proof of this may be found in the so-called Book of the Dead, which has been deciphered by the diligence of nineteenth-century scholars.¹ It is “the greatest coherent literary work that has come down to us from ancient Egypt.” It contains all kinds of instructions and prayers that were put into the tomb of each deceased person to serve as a guide when he was released from his mortal tenement. The most intimate ideas of the Egyptians about the eternal and the origin of the world are contained in this work. These views point to a conception of the gods similar to that of Greek mysticism.

Osiris gradually became the preëminent and most universally recognized of the various deities worshipped in different parts of Egypt. In him were comprized the ideas about the other divinities. Whatever the majority of the Egyptian people may have thought about Osiris, the Book of the Dead indicates that the priestly wisdom saw in him a being that might be found in the human soul herself. Everything said about death and the dead shows this plainly. While the body is given to earth and kept by it, the Eternal in man enters upon the path to the primordial Eternal. It comes before the tribunal of Osiris and the forty-two judges of the dead. The fate of the Eternal in man depends on the verdict of these judges. If the soul has confessed her sins, and has been deemed reconciled to eternal justice, invisible powers approach her and say: “The Osiris N. has been purified in the pool which is south of the field of Hotep. and north of the field of Locusts, where the gods of verdure purify themselves at the fourth hour of the night and the eighth hour of the day with the image of the heart of the gods, passing from night to day.” Thus, within the eternal cosmic order the Eternal in man is itself addressed as an Osiris. After the name Osiris comes the deceased person’s own name; and the one who is uniting with the eternal cosmic order also alls himself “Osiris”. “I am the Osiris N. Growing under the blossoms of the fig-tree is the name of Osiris N.” Thus man becomes an Osiris. Being Osiris is only a perfect stage in human development. It seems obvious that even the Osiris who is a judge within the eternal cosmic order is nothing more than a perfect man, Between being human and being divine there is a difference in degree and number. The mystic view of the mystery of number underlies this. Osiris as a cosmic being is One, yet he exists, nevertheless, undivided in each human soul. Every human being is an Osiris, yet the One Osiris must be represented as a Separate being. Man is in course of development, and at the end of his evolutionary career he becomes divine. In taking this view we must speak of Divine-ness, or becoming divine, rather than of a finished divine being, complete in himself.

[ 2 ] It cannot be doubted that, according to this view, only he can really enter upon the Osiris existence who has reached the portals of the eternal cosmic order as an Osiris. Thus the highest life which man can lead must consist in his changing himself into Osiris. Even during mortal life a true man will live as a perfect Osiris as far as he can. He becomes perfect when he lives as an Osiris, when he passes through the experiences of Osiris. This lends a deeper significance to the Osiris myth. It becomes the ideal of the man who wishes to awaken the Eternal within himself.

Osiris is torn to pieces, killed by Typhon. The fragments of his body are preserved and cared for by his consort, Isis. After his death he let a ray of his own light fall upon her, and she bore him Horus. This Horus takes up the earthly tasks of Osiris. He is the second Osiris, still imperfect, but progressing towards the true Osiris.

The true Osiris is in the human soul, who at the outset is of a transitory nature; but as such she i destined to give birth to the Eternal. Man may there: fore regard himself as the tomb of Osiris. Man's lower nature (Typhon) has killed his higher nature. Love in his soul (Isis) must nurture the dead fragments of his body, and then the higher nature, the eternal soul (Horus) will be born, who can progress to Osiris existence. The man aspiring to the highest kind of existence must repeat in himself microcosmically the macrocosmic universal Osiris process. This is the meaning of Egyptian initiation. What Plato (cf. p. 66) describes as a cosmic process—that the Creator has stretched the soul of the world on the body of the world in the form of a cross, and that the cosmic process is the redemption of this crucified soul,—this process had to be enacted in man on a smaller scale if he was to be qualified for Osiris-existence. The candidate for initiation had to develop himself in such a way that his soul-experience, his becoming an Osiris, blended into one with the cosmic Osiris process.

If we could look into the temples of initiation in which people underwent the transformation into Osiris, we should see that what took place represented microcosmically a cosmic genesis. Man who proceeded from the Father was to give birth to the Son in himself. What he actually bears within him, that is, Divinity under a spell, was to become manifest in him. This divinity is kept down in him by the power of the earthly nature; this lower nature must first be buried in order that the higher nature may arise.

This clarifies what we are told about the incidents of initiation. The candidate was subjected to mysterious procedures by means of which his earthly nature was killed and his higher nature awakened. It is not Necessary to study these procedures in detail if we understand their meaning. This meaning is contained in the confession possible to everyone who went through initiation. He could say: “I envisioned the endless perspective at the end of which lies the perfection of the Divine. I felt that the power of this Divine is within me. I buried what keeps down that bower in me. I died to earthly things. I was dead. I had died as a lower man; I was in the nether-world. I had intercourse with the dead, with those who have already become part of the eternal cosmic order. After my sojourn in the nether-world I arose from the dead. I overcame death, but now I have become a different being. I have nothing more to do with perishable nature. For me this has become saturated with the Logos. I now belong to those who live eternally, and who will sit at the right hand of Osiris. I myself shall be a true Osiris, part of the eternal cosmic order; and the judgment of life and death will be placed in my hands.” The candidate for initiation had to submit to the experience which made such a confession possible for him. It was an experience of the highest kind that the neophite passed through.

[ 3 ] Let us now imagine that a non-initiate hears of such experiences. He cannot know what has really taken place in the initiate’s soul. In his eyes the initiate died physically, lay in the grave, and rose again. What is a spiritual reality at a higher stage of existence appears, when expressed in the form of sense-reality, as an event which breaks through the order of nature. It is a “miracle”. In this sense initiation was a miracle. One who really wished to understand it must have awakened within himself powers to enable him to stand on a higher plane of existence. He must have approached these higher experiences through a course of life specially adapted to that purpose. In whatever way these prepared experiences took place in individual cases, they are always found to be of quite a definite type; so an initiate’s life is a typical one. It may be described quite apart from the single personality. In fact, an individual could only be described as being on the way to the Divine if he had passed through these definite typical experiences.

Such a personality was Buddha, living in the midst of his disciples. Jesus appeared as such a personality to his followers. Nowadays we know of the parallelism that exists between the biographies of Buddha and of Jesus. Rudolf Seydel has convincingly proved this parallelism in his book, Buddha und Christus. We have only to follow out the two lives in detail in order to see that all objections to the parallelism are futile.

[ 4 ] The birth of Buddha is announced by a white elephant that descends from heaven and declares to the queen, Maya, that she will bring forth a divine man who “will attune all beings to love and friendship, and will unite them in a close alliance.” We read in St. Luke’s Gospel: “To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. And the angel came in unto her, and said, ‘Hail, thou that art highly favoured... Behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest.”

The Brahmins, or Indian priests, who know what the birth of a Buddha means, interpret Maya’s dream. They have a definite, typical idea of a Buddha, to which the life of the personality about to be born will have to correspond. Similarly we read in Matthew II, 1, that when Herod “had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, he demanded of them where Christ should be born.” The Brahmin Asita says of Buddha: “This is the child which will become Buddha, the redeemer, the leader to immortality, freedom, and light.” Compare with this Luke 11, 25: “And, behold, there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon; and the same man was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel: and the Holy Ghost was upon him ... And when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him after the custom of the law, then took he him up in his arms, and blessed God, and said, Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: for mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people: a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.”

It is related of Buddha that at the age of twelve he was lost, and found again under a tree, surrounded by poets and sages of the olden time, whom he was teaching. With this incident the following passage in St. Luke corresponds: “Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up to Jerusalem after the custom of the feast. And when they had fulfilled the days, as they returned, the child Jesus tarried behind in Jerusalem; and Joseph and his mother knew not of it. But they, supposing him to have been in the company, went a day's journey; and they sought him among their kinsfolk and acquaintance. And when they found him not, they turned back again to Jerusalem, seeking him. And it came to pass that after three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions. And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers.” (Luke II, 41-47).

After Buddha had lived in solitude and returned, he was received by the benediction of a virgin, “Blessed is thy mother, blessed is thy father, blessed is the wife to whom thou belongest.” But he replied, “Only they are blessed who are in Nirvana,” that is, who have entered the eternal cosmic order. In St. Luke’s Gospel (XI, 27), we read: “And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice and said unto him, ‘Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked.” But he said, ‘Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.'”

In the course of Buddha’s life, the tempter comes to him and promises him all the kingdoms of the earth. Buddha refuses everything in the words: “I know well that I am destined to have a kingdom, but I do not desire an earthly one. I shall become Buddha and make all the world exult with joy.” The tempter has to own that his reign is over. Jesus answers the same temptation in the words: “Get thee hence, Satan, for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. Then the devil leaveth him.” (Matthew IV, 10, 11). This description of the parallelism might be extended to many other points with the same result.

The life of Buddha ended sublimely. On a journey, he felt ill; he came to the river Hiranja, near Kuschinagara. There he lay down on a carpet which his favorite disciple, Ananda, spread for him. His body began to be luminous from within. He died transfigured, his body irradiating light, saying: “Nothing endures.”

The death of Buddha corresponds with the trans: figuration of Jesus. “And it came to pass about eight days after these sayings, he took Peter and John and James, and went up into a mountain to pray. And as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered and his raiment was white and glistering.”

Buddha’s earthly life ends at this point, but it is here that the most important part of the life of Jesus begins—His suffering, death, and resurrection. What differentiates Buddha from Christ exists in the conditions necessitating the extension of the life of Christ Jesus beyond the scope of the Buddha life. Buddha and Christ will not be understood by merely mixing them. (This will become clear in the course of this book.) Other accounts of Buddha's death need not here be considered, even though they reveal profound aspects.

[ 5 ] The agreement in the lives of the two redeemers leads to the same conclusion. The narratives themselves indicate the nature of this conclusion. When the Priest-sages hear what kind of birth is to take place, they know what is involved. They know that they have to do with a God-Man; they know beforehand what kind of personality it is who is appearing. And therefore his course of life can only correspond with what they know about the life of a God-Man. In the Wisdom of their Mysteries such a life is traced out for all eternity. It can only be as it must be; it comes into manifestation like an eternal law of nature. Just as a chemical substance can only behave in a certain definite way, so a Buddha or a Christ can only live in A certain definite way. His life is not described merely by writing a fortuitous biography, but by giving its typical features that are contained for all time in the Wisdom of the Mysteries. The Buddha legend is no more a biography in the ordinary sense than the Gospels are meant to be a biography of the Christ Jesus in the ordinary sense. In neither is the merely accidental given; both relate the course of life marked out for a world-redeemer. The pattern of the two accounts is to be found in the Mystery traditions, not in outer physical history. Jesus and Buddha are, to those who have recognized their divine nature, initiates in the most eminent sense. (Jesus is the initiate by virtue of the Christ Being dwelling in Him.) Hence their lives are lifted out of things transitory, and what is known about initiates applies to them. The fortuitous incidents in their lives are not narrated, but rather it is said of them:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a God... And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” (St. John I, 1 and 14).

[ 6 ] But the life of Jesus contains more than does the life of Buddha. Buddha’s life ends with the transfiguration; the most momentous part of the life of Jesus begins after the transfiguration. In the language of initiates this means that Buddha reached the point at which divine light begins to shine in men. He faces mortal death. He becomes the light of the world: Jesus goes farther. He does not physically,die at the moment when the light of the world shines through him. At that moment he is a Buddha. But at that very moment he enters upon a stage which finds expression in a higher degree of initiation. He suffers and dies. What is earthly disappears. But the spiritual element, the light of the world, does not. His resurrection follows. He is revealed to his followers as Christ. Buddha, at the moment of his transfiguration, dissolves into the blissful life of the universal spirit. Christ Jesus once more calls the universal spirit into Present existence in human form. Such an event had formerly taken place at the higher stages of initiation in a symbolical sense. Those initiated in the spirit of the Osiris myth attained in their consciousness to such a resurrection as a symbolical experience. In the life of Jesus, this “great” initiation was added to the Buddha initiation, not as a symbolical experience, but as reality. Buddha demonstrated by his life that man is the Logos, and that he returns to the Logos, to the light, when his earthly part dies. In Jesus, the Logos itself became a person. In Him, the Word was made flesh.

[ 7 ] Therefore, what was enacted in the innermost recesses of the temples by the guardians of the ancient Mysteries has been apprehended through Christianity as a historical fact. The followers of Christ Jesus confessed their belief in Him, the initiate; in Him who was initiated in a manner unique in its magnitude. He proved to them that the world is divine. In the Christian community the wisdom of the Mysteries was indissolubly bound up with the personality of Christ Jesus. That which man previously had sought to attain through the Mysteries was now replaced by the belief that Christ had lived on earth, and that the faithful belonged to him.

Henceforward, part of what was formerly only to be gained through mystic methods could be replaced in the Christian community by the conviction that the Divine had been manifested in the Word present among them. Not that for which each individual soul underwent a long preparation was now alone decisive, but what those had heard and seen who were with Jesus, and what was handed down by them. “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which... our hands have handled, of the Word of Life... that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us.” Thus do we read in the first Epistle of St. John. And this immediate reality is to embrace all future generations in a living bond of union, and as a church is mystically to extend from race to race. It is in this sense that the words of St. Augustine are to be under " stood, “I should not believe the Gospels unless the authority of the Catholic Church induced me to do so.” Thus the Gospels do not contain within themselves testimony to their truth, but they are to be believed because they are founded on the personality of Jesus, and because the Church from that personality mysteriously draws the power to make the truth of the Gospels manifest.

The Mysteries handed down traditionally the means of arriving at truth; the Christian community propaBates truth itself. To the confidence in the mystical forces that spring up in the inmost being of man durIng initiation was to be added the confidence in the One, in the primordial Initiator.

The mystics sought to become divine, they wished to experience divinity. Jesus was divine, we must hold fast to Him, and then we shall become partakers of His divinity in the community founded by Him—this became Christian conviction. What was divine in Jesus became so for all His followers. “Lo, I am with you alway even unto the end of the world.” (St. Matthew, XXVIII 20). The one who was born in Bethlehem has an eternal character. The Christmas anthem rightly sings of the birth of Jesus as if it took place each Christmas “Christ is born to-day, the Saviour has come into the world to-day, today the angels are singing on earth.”

In the Christ-experience we should recognize a definite stage of initiation. When the mystic of pre-Christian times passed through this Christ-experience he was, through his initiation, in a state that enabled him to perceive something spiritually—in higher worlds—to which no fact in the world of sense corresponded. He experienced in the higher world what the Mystery of Golgotha comprises. Now, when the Christian mystic goes through this experience by initiation he at the same time beholds the historical event that took place on Golgotha, and he knows that in that event, enacted within the physical world, there is the same content that existed formerly only in the super sensible facts of the Mysteries. Thus there was poured out on the Christian community, through the Mystery of Golgotha, that which formerly had been poured out on the mystics within the temples. And initiation gives Christian mystics the possibility of discerning what is contained in the Mystery of Golgotha, whereas faith makes man an unconscious partaker of the mystical stream which flowed from the events depicted in the New Testament, and which has ever since pervaded the spiritual life of humanity.

• 1. (Cf. Lepsius, Das Totenbuch der alten Ägypter, (The Book Of the Dead of the Ancient Egyptians.) Berlin, 1842).

[ 1 ] “When released from the body you ascend to the free aether, you will become an immortal god, escaping death.” In these words Empedocles epitomizes what the ancient Egyptians thought about the eternal in man and its connection with the divine. Evidence of this is provided by the so-called Book of The Dead which has been deciphered by the diligence of nineteenth century research workers. (See Lepsius, Das Totenbuch der alen Ägypter, Berlin, 1842.) It is “the greatest coherent literary work of the Egyptians which has been preserved to us.” It contains all kinds of teachings and prayers, which were put in the grave with each dead person to guide him when he was released from his mortal frame. The Egyptians' most intimate conceptions about the eternal and the genesis of the world are contained in this literary work. These conceptions indeed indicate ideas of the gods similar to those of Greek mysticism. Of the various deities worshiped in different parts of Egypt, Osiris gradually became the favorite and most universally acknowledged. In him the ideas about the other divinities were summarized. Whatever the Egyptian populace may have thought about Osiris, the Book of the Dead indicates that according to the ideas of priestly wisdom he was a being which could be found in the human soul itself. This is expressed clearly in everything they thought about death and the dead. When the body is given up to the earth, preserved within the earthly element, then the eternal part of man sets out upon the path to the primordial eternal. It is called to judgment before Osiris, who is surrounded by forty-two judges of the dead. The fate of the eternal in man depends upon the verdict of these judges. If the soul has confessed its sins and is found to be reconciled with eternal righteousness, invisible powers approach it, saying, “The Osiris N. has been purified in the pool which is south of the field of Hotep and north of the field of Locusts, where the gods of verdure purify themselves at the fourth hour of the night and the eighth hour of the day with the image of the heart of the gods, passing from night to day.” Thus within the eternal cosmic order the eternal part of man is addressed as an Osiris. After the title Osiris, the individual name of the person concerned is mentioned. The person who is uniting himself with the eternal cosmic order also calls himself “Osiris.” “I am Osiris N. Growing under the blossoms of the fig tree is the name of Osiris N.”⁶⁰ Thus man becomes an Osiris. The Osiris-existence is only a perfect stage of development of human existence. It seems obvious that even the Osiris who judges within the eternal cosmic order is none other than a perfect man. Between human existence and divine existence is a difference in degree and number. At the root of this lies the conception of the Mysteries concerning the mystery of “number.” The cosmic being Osiris is One; nevertheless he exists undivided in every human soul. Each man is an Osiris, yet the one Osiris must be represented as a special being. Man is engaged in development; at the end of his evolutionary course lies his existence as a god. Within this conception one must speak of divinity rather than of a perfected, completed divine being.

[ 2 ] There is no doubt that according to such a conception only one who has already reached the gate of the eternal cosmic order as an Osiris can really enter upon Osiris-existence. So the highest life man can lead must consist in changing himself into an Osiris. In the true man an Osiris must already live as perfectly as possible during mortal life. Man becomes perfect when he lives as an Osiris, when he experiences what Osiris has experienced. In this way the Osiris myth receives its deeper significance. It becomes the example of a man who wishes to awaken the eternal within him. Osiris had been torn to pieces, killed by Typhon. The fragments of his body were cherished and cared for by his consort Isis. After his death he let a ray of his light fall upon her, and she bore him Horus. Horus took over the earthly tasks of Osiris. He is the second Osiris, still imperfect but progressing toward the true Osiris.—The true Osiris is in the human soul. The latter is of a transitory nature at first. However, its transitory nature is destined to give birth to the eternal. Therefore man may consider himself to be the tomb of Osiris. The lower nature (Typhon) has killed the higher nature in him. Love in his soul (Isis) must cherish and care for the dead fragments; then will be born the higher nature, the eternal soul (Horus), which can progress to Osiris-existence. Whoever strives toward the highest existence must repeat in himself, as a microcosm, the macrocosmic, universal process of Osiris. This is the meaning of the Egyptian “initiation.” The process Plato describes as cosmic,—i.e., that the Creator has stretched the soul of the world upon the body of the world in the form of a cross, and that the cosmic process is a redemption of this crucified soul—on a small scale this process had to happen to man if he was to be capable of Osiris-existence. The neophyte had to develop himself in such a way that his soul-experience, his development as an Osiris, became identified with the cosmic Osiris process. If we could look into the temples of initiation where people were subjected to the transformation into Osiris, we would see that what happened there represented microcosmically the creation of the world. Man, who is descended from the “Father,” was to give birth in himself to the Son. The spellbound god, whom he actually bore within him, was to be revealed in him. The power of earthly nature suppressed this god within him. First this lower nature had to be buried in order that the higher nature might rise again. From this it becomes possible to interpret what is told of the processes of initiation. The candidate was subjected to secret procedures. By means of the latter his earthly nature was killed and his higher nature awakened. It is not necessary to study these procedures in detail. One must only understand their meaning. And this meaning is contained in the acknowledgment which everyone who has been through initiation could make. He could say: Before me floated the endless perspective, at the end of which lies the perfection of the divine. I felt the power of the divine within me. I buried what holds down this power within me. I died to earthly things. I was dead. As a lower man I had died; I was in the netherworld. I communicated with the dead, that is, with those who already have become part of the circle of the eternal cosmic order. After my sojourn in the nether world I arose from the dead. I overcame death, but now I have become different. I have nothing more to do with transitory nature. My transitory nature has become permeated by the Logos. I now belong to those who live eternally, and who will sit at the right hand of Osiris. I myself shall be a true Osiris, united with the eternal cosmic order, and judgment over death and life shall be placed in my hand. The neophyte had to undergo the experience which could lead him to such an acknowledgment. The experience which thus approached man was of the highest kind.

[ 3 ] Let us now imagine that a non-initiate hears that someone has undergone such experiences. He cannot know what has really taken place in the soul of the initiate. In his eyes, the initiate has died physically, has laid in the grave and has risen. When expressed in terms of material reality an occurrence which has spiritual reality at a higher stage of existence appears to break through the order of nature. It is a “miracle.” Such a “miracle” was initiation. Whoever wished really to understand it must have awakened within himself powers which would enable him to reach a higher stage of existence. He had to prepare the whole course of his life in order to approach these higher experiences. However they might take place in individual lives, these prepared experiences always had a quite definite, typical form. So the life of an initiate is a typical one. It may be described apart from the individual personality. Or rather, an individual personality could be characterized only as being on the way toward the divine if he had gone through these definite, typical experiences. As such a personality the Buddha lived with his followers; as such a personality Jesus at first appeared to his community. Today we know of the parallels which exist between the biographies of Buddha and of Jesus. Rudolf Seydel has pointed out these parallels strikingly in his book, Buddha and Christ. We need only follow up the details to see that all objections to these parallels are futile.

[ 4 ] The birth of Buddha is announced by a white elephant who descends to Maya, the queen. He declares that she will bring forth a divine man who “attunes all people to love and friendship and unites them in an intimate company.” In Luke's Gospel is written: “... to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David: and the virgin's name was Mary. And the angel came in unto her and said, ‘Hail thou that art highly favored ... Behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great and shall be called the Son of the Highest.’” Maya's dream is interpreted by the Brahmins, the Indian priests, who know that it signifies the birth of a Buddha. They have a definite, typical idea of a Buddha. The life of the individual personality will have to correspond to this idea. Correspondingly we read in Matthew 2:1, et seq., that when Herod “had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, he demanded of them where Christ should be born.”—The Brahmin Asita says of Buddha, “This is the child which will become Buddha, the redeemer, the leader to immortality, freedom and light.” Compare this with Luke 2:5: “And behold there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; and the same man was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel: and the Holy Ghost was upon him ... And when the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him after the custom of the law, then took he him up in his arms, and blessed God, and said, Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: for mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.” It is related of Buddha that at the age of twelve he was lost, and was found again under a tree, surrounded by minstrels and sages of ancient times, whom he was teaching. This corresponds to Luke 2:41–47: “Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up to Jerusalem after the custom of the feast. And when they had fulfilled the days, as they returned, the child Jesus tarried behind in Jerusalem, and Joseph and his mother knew not of it. But they, supposing him to have been in the company, went a day's journey; and they sought him among their kinsfolk and acquaintance. And when they found him not, they turned back again to Jerusalem, seeking him. And it came to pass that after three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions. And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers.”—After Buddha had lived in solitude and had returned, he was received by the benediction of a virgin: “Blessed is the mother, blessed is the father, blessed is the wife to whom thou belongest.” But he replied, “Only they are blessed who are in Nirvana,” i.e., those who have entered the eternal cosmic order. In Luke 11:2–28 is written: “And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice and said unto him, ‘Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked.’ But he said, ‘Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.’” In the course of Buddha's life the tempter approaches him, promising him all the kingdoms of the earth. Buddha will have nothing to do with this, answering, “I know well that a kingdom is appointed to me, but I do not desire an earthly one; I shall become Buddha and make all the world exult for joy.” The tempter has to admit, “My reign is over.” Jesus answers the same temptation in the words: “Get thee hence, Satan, for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. Then the devil leaveth him.” (Matthew 4:10,11)—This description of parallelism might be extended to many other points: the results would be the same. The life of Buddha ended sublimely. During a journey he felt ill. He came to the river Hiranja, near Kuschinagara. There he lay down on a carpet spread for him by his favorite disciple, Ananda. His body began to shine from within. He died transfigured, a body of light, saying, “Nothing endures.” The death of Buddha corresponds with the transfiguration of Jesus: “And it came to pass about eight days after these sayings, he took Peter and John and James, and went up into a mountain to pray. And as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered, and his raiment was white and glistening.” At this point Buddha's earthly life ends, but the most important part of the life of Jesus begins here: Passion, Death and Resurrection. The difference between Buddha and Christ lies in what necessitated the continuation of the life of Christ Jesus beyond that of Buddha. Buddha and Christ are not understood by simply throwing them together. (This will become evident in the subsequent chapters of this book.) Other accounts of the death of Buddha need not be considered here, although they also reveal profound aspects of the subject.

[ 5 ] The conformity in the lives of these two redeemers leads to an unequivocal conclusion. What this conclusion must be, the narratives themselves indicate. When the priest sages hear about the manner of the birth they know what is involved. They know that they are dealing with a divine man. They know beforehand what conditions will exist for the personality who is appearing. Therefore his career can only correspond with what they know about the career of a divine man. Such a career appears in their Mystery wisdom, marked out for all eternity. It can be only as it must be. Such a career appears as an eternal law of nature. Just as a chemical substance can behave only in a quite definite way, so a Buddha or a Christ can live only in a quite definite way. His career cannot be described as one would write his incidental biography; rather, it is described by giving the typical features contained for all time in the wisdom of the Mysteries. The legend of Buddha is no more a biography in the ordinary sense, than the Gospels are intended to be an ordinary biography of the Christ Jesus. Neither describes an incidental career; both describe a career marked out for a world-redeemer. The patterns for both must be sought in the traditions of the Mysteries, not in outward physical history. To those who have perceived their divine nature, Buddha and Jesus are initiates in the most eminent sense. (Jesus is an initiate because the Christ Being incarnates in him.) Thus everything transitory is removed from their lives. What is known about initiates can be applied to them. The incidental events of their lives are no longer described. It is said of them, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ... And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” (John 1:1,14)

[ 6 ] The life of Jesus, however, contains more than the life of Buddha. Buddha's life ends with the transfiguration. The most significant part of the life of Jesus begins after the transfiguration. In the language of the initiates, Buddha reaches the point where divine light begins to shine in man. He stands before the death of the physical. He becomes the cosmic light. Jesus goes further. He does not die physically at the moment the cosmic light transfigures him. At that moment he is a Buddha. But at the same moment he enters upon a stage which finds expression in a higher degree of initiation. He suffers and dies. The physical part of him disappears. But the spiritual, the cosmic light does not vanish. His resurrection follows. He reveals himself to his community as Christ. At the moment of his transfiguration, Buddha dissolves into the hallowed life of the universal Spirit. Christ Jesus awakens this universal Spirit once more to present existence in a human form. Such an event had formerly taken place in a pictorial sense at the higher stages of initiation. Those initiated according to the Osiris myth attained to such a resurrection in their consciousness as a pictorial experience. In the life of Jesus this “great” initiation was added to the Buddha initiation, not as a pictorial experience, but as reality. Buddha demonstrated by his life that man is the Logos and that he returns to this Logos, to the light, when his physical part dies. In Jesus the Logos itself became a person. In him the Word became flesh.

[ 7 ] What was enacted for the ancient cults of the Mysteries within the Mystery-temples, through Christianity has been grasped as a world-historical fact. His community acknowledged the Christ Jesus, the initiate, initiated in a uniquely great way. He proved to them that the world is divine. For the community of Christ, the wisdom of the Mysteries was indissolubly bound up with the personality of Christ Jesus. The belief that he lived and that those who acknowledge him, belong to him, replaced what would have been attained previously through the Mysteries. Henceforth for those in the community of Christ a part of what previously was only to be attained by the methods of the mystics, could be replaced by the conviction that the divine is given in the Word which had been present. The determining factor was no longer only that for which each individual spirit had to undergo a long preparation, but also the account of what they had heard and seen, handed down by those who were with Jesus. “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we ourselves have beheld, which our hands have touched, concerning the Word of life ... that which we have seen and heard, we proclaim to you, that you may have fellowship with us.” Thus it is written in the first Epistle of John. This immediate reality is to embrace all future generations in a living bond; as a Church it is to extend mystically from generation to generation. In this way we may understand the words of Augustine, “I should not believe the Gospel except as moved by the authority of the Church.”⁶¹ The Gospels, therefore, contain in themselves no evidence of their truth, but they are to be believed because they are founded on the personality of Jesus, and because in a mysterious way the Church draws from this personality the power to make them appear as truth. The Mysteries handed down through tradition the means of coming to the truth; the Christian community propagates this truth itself. Faith in the One, the primordial Initiator was to be added to faith in the mystical forces which light up in man's inner being during initiation. The mystics sought apotheosis; they wished to experience it. Jesus was made divine; we must cling to him; then we are participants in his apotheosis within the community established by him:—This became Christian conviction. What was made divine in Jesus, is made divine for his whole community. “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” (Matthew 28:20) The one born in Bethlehem has an eternal character. Thus the Christmas antiphon is able to speak of the birth of Jesus as if it took place every Christmas: “Today Christ is born; today the Saviour has come into the world; today the angels are singing on earth.”⁶²

In the Christ-experience a quite definite stage of initiation is to be seen. When the mystic of pre-Christian times went through this Christ-experience, then, through his initiation, he was in a condition enabling him to perceive something spiritual—in higher worlds—for which the material world had no corresponding fact. He experienced what comprises the Mystery of Golgotha in the higher world. Now when the Christian mystic goes through this experience, through initiation, at the same time he beholds the historical event on Golgotha and knows that in this event, which took place in the world of the senses, is the same content as formerly existed only in the supersensible facts of the Mysteries. What had descended upon the mystics within the Mystery temples in earlier times thus descended upon the community of Christ through the “Mystery of Golgotha.” And initiation gives the Christian mystic the possibility of becoming conscious of this content of the “Mystery of Golgotha,” while faith causes mankind to participate unconsciously in the mystical current which flowed from the events depicted in the New Testament and has been permeating the spiritual life of humanity ever since.

• 60. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Chapter 125, 19–22. Papyrus of NU.
• 61. Augustine, St., one of the four great Fathers of the Latin Church, born 354 in Tagaste, Numidia, and died as Bishop of Hippo during the siege of that city by the Vandals in 430. Steiner's reference is to Augustine's work, Against the Epistle of Manichaeus called Fundamental, par. 6.
• 62. The Christmas Antiphon to which Steiner refers is found in the Breviarium Romanum, and appears just before the end of the Christmas section, In Nativitate Domini, headed Ad Magnificat Antiphona:
  
  Hodie Christus natus est;
  hodie Salvator apparuit:
  hodie in terra canunt Angeli,
  laetantur Archangeli:
  hodie exultant justi,
  dicentes: Gloria in excelsis
  Deo, alleluia.

When we consider how Karma works,¹ we always have to bear in mind that the human Ego, which is the essential being, the inmost being, of man, has as it were three instruments through which it is able to live and express itself in the world. These are the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body. Man really carries the physical, etheric and astral bodies with him through the world, but he himself is not in any one of these bodies. In the truest sense he is the Ego; and it is the Ego which both suffers and creates Karma.

Now the point is to gain an understanding of the relationship between man as the Ego-being and these three instrumental forms—if I may call them so—the physical, etheric and astral bodies. This will give us the foundation for an understanding of the essence of Karma. We shall gain a fruitful point of view for the study of the physical, the etheric and the astral in man in relation to Karma, if we consider the following.

The physical as we behold it in the mineral kingdom, the etheric as we find it working in the plant kingdom, and the astral as we find it working in the animal kingdom—all these are to be found in the environment of man here on Earth. In the Cosmos surrounding the Earth we have that Universe into which, if I may so describe it, the Earth extends on all sides. Man can feel a certain relationship between what takes place on the Earth and what takes place in the cosmic environment. But when we come to Spiritual Science we have to ask: Is this relationship really so commonplace as the present-day scientific conception of the world imagines? This modern scientific conception of the world examines the physical qualities of everything on the Earth, living and lifeless. It also investigates the stars, the sun, the moon, etc.; and it discovers—indeed it is particularly proud of the discovery—that these heavenly bodies are fundamentally of the same nature as the Earth.

Such a conception can only result from a form of knowledge which at no point comes to a real grasp of man himself—a knowledge which takes hold only of what is external to man. The moment, however, we really take hold of Man as he stands within the Universe, we become able to discover the relationships between the several instrumental members of man's nature, the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body and the corresponding entities, the corresponding realities of Being, in the Cosmos.

In regard to the etheric body of man, we find spread out in the Cosmos the universal Ether. The etheric body of man has a definite human shape, definite forms of movement within it, and so on. These, it is true, are different in the cosmic Ether. Nevertheless the cosmic Ether is fundamentally of like nature with what we find in the human etheric body. In the same way we can speak of a similarity between what is found in the human astral body and a certain astral principle that works through all things and all beings out in the far-spread Universe.

Here we come to something of extraordinary importance, something which in its true nature is quite foreign to the human being of to-day. Let us take our start from this. (A drawing is made on the blackboard). We have, first, the Earth; and on the Earth we have Man, with his etheric body. Then in the Earth's environment we have the cosmic Ether—the cosmic Ether which is of the same nature as the etheric in man. In man we also have the astral body. In the cosmic environment too there is Astrality. Where are we to find this cosmic Astrality? Where is it? It is indeed to be found, but we must first discover—what it is in the Cosmos that betrays the presence of cosmic Astrality; what it is that reveals it. Somewhere or other is the Astrality. Is this Astrality in the Cosmos quite invisible and imperceptible, or is it, after all, in some way perceptible to us?

In itself, of course, the Ether too is imperceptible for our physical senses. If I may put it so, when you are looking at a small fragment of Ether, you see nothing with your physical senses, you simply see through it. The Ether is like an empty nothingness to you. But when you regard the etheric environment as a totality, you behold the blue sky, of which we also say that it is not really there but that you are gazing into empty space. Now the reason why you see the blue of the sky is that you are actually perceiving the end of the Ether. Thus you behold the Ether as the blue of the heavens. The perception of the blue sky is really and truly a perception of the Ether. We may therefore say: In that we perceive the blue of the sky we are perceiving the universal Ether that surrounds us.

At first contact, we see through the Ether. It allows us to do so; and yet, it makes itself perceptible in the blue heavens. Hence the existence for human perception of the blue of the sky is expressed in that we say: The Ether itself, though imperceptible, yet rises to the level of perceptibility by reason of the great majesty with which it stands there in the Universe, revealing its presence, making itself known in the blue of the vast expanse.

Physical science theorises materialistically about the blue of the sky; and for physical science it is indeed very difficult to reach any intelligent conclusion on this point, for the simple reason that it is bound to admit that where we see the blue of the sky there is nothing physical. Nevertheless men spin out the most elaborate theories to explain how the rays of light are reflected and refracted in a peculiar way so as to call forth this blue of the sky. In reality, it is here that the super-sensible world begins already to hold sway. In the Cosmos the Supersensible does indeed become visible to us. We have only to discover where and how it becomes visible. The Ether becomes perceptible to us through the blue of the sky.

But now, somewhere there is also present the astral element of the Cosmos. In the blue sky the Ether peers through, as it were, into the realms of sense. Where then does the Astrality in the Cosmos peer through into the realms of perceptibility? The answer, my dear friends, is this.

Every star that we see glittering in the heavens is in reality a gate of entry for the Astral. Wherever the stars are twinkling and glittering in towards us, there glitters and shines the Astral. Look at the starry heavens in their manifold variety; in one part the stars are gathered into heaps and clusters, or in another they are scattered far apart. In all this wonderful configuration of radiant light, the invisible and super-sensible astral body of the Cosmos makes itself visible to us.

For this reason we must not consider the world of stars unspiritually. To look up to the world of stars and speak of worlds of burning gases is just as though—forgive the apparent absurdity of the comparison, but it is precisely true—it is just as though someone who loves you were gently stroking you, holding the fingers a little apart, and you were then to say that it feels like so many little ribbons being drawn across your cheek. It is no more untrue that little ribbons are laid across your cheek when someone strokes you, than that there exist up there in the heavens those material entities of which modern physics tells. It is the astral body of the Universe which is perpetually wielding its influences—like the gently stroking fingers—on the etheric organism of the Cosmos. The etheric Cosmos is organised for very long duration; it is for this reason that a star has its quality of fixity, representing a perpetual influence on the cosmic Ether by the astral Universe. It lasts far longer than the stroking of your cheek. But in the Cosmos things do last longer, for there we are dealing with gigantic measures. Thus in the starry heavens that we perceive, we actually behold an expression of the soul-life of the cosmic astral world.

In this way, an immense, unfathomable life, yet, at the same time, a soul-life, a real and actual life of the soul, is brought into the Cosmos. Think how dead the Cosmos appears to us when we look into the far spaces and see nothing but burning gaseous bodies. Think how living it all becomes when we know that the stars are an expression of the love with which the astral Cosmos works upon the etheric Cosmos—for this is to express it with perfect truth. Think then of those mysterious processes when certain stars suddenly light up at certain times,—processes which have only been explained to us by means of physical hypotheses that do not lead to any real understanding. Stars that were not there before, light up for a time, and disappear again. Thus in the Cosmos too there is a “stroking” of shorter duration. For it is true indeed that in epochs when divine Beings desire to work in an especial way from the astral world into the etheric, we behold new stars light up and fade away again.

We ourselves in our own astral body have feelings of delight and comfort in the most varied ways. In like manner in the Cosmos, through the cosmic astral body, we have the varied configuration of the starry heavens. No wonder that an ancient science, instinctively clairvoyant, describes this third member of our human organism as the “astral” or “starry” body, seeing that it is of like nature with that which reveals itself to us in the stars.

It is only the Ego that we do not find revealed in the cosmic environment. Why is this? We shall find the reason if we consider how this human Ego manifests here on the Earth, in a world that is in reality threefold,—physical, etheric and astral. The Ego of man, as it appears within the Universe, is ever and again a repetition of former lives on Earth; and again and again it finds itself in the life between death and a new birth. But when we observe the Ego in its life between death and a new birth, we perceive that the Etheric which we have here in the cosmic environment of the Earth has no significance for the human Ego. The etheric body is laid aside soon after death. It is only the astral world, that shines in towards us through the stars that has significance for the Ego in the life between death and a new birth. And in that world which glistens in towards us through the stars, in that world there live the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies with whom man forms his Karma between death and a new birth.

Indeed, when we follow this Ego in its successive evolutions through lives between birth and death and between death and a new birth, we cannot remain within the world of Space at all. For two successive earthly lives cannot be within the same space. They cannot be within that Universe which is dependent on spatial co-existence. Here therefore we go right out of Space and enter into Time. This is actually so. We go out of Space and come into the pure flow of Time when we contemplate the Ego in its successive lives on Earth.

Now consider this, my dear friends. In Space, Time is still present, of course, but within this world of Space we have no means of experiencing Time in itself. We always have to experience Time through Space and spatial processes. For example, if you wish to experience Time, you look at the clock, or, if you will, at the course of the sun. What do you see? You see the various positions of the hands of the clock or of the sun. You see something that is spatial. Through the fact that the positions of the hand or of the sun are changed, through the fact that spatial things are present to you as changing, you gain some idea of Time. But of Time itself there is really nothing in this spatial perception. There are only varied spatial configurations, varied positions of the hands of the clock, varied positions of the sun. You only experience Time itself when you come into the sphere of the soul's experience. There you do really experience Time, but there you also go out of Space. There, Time is a reality, but within the earthly world of Space, Time is no reality. What, then, must happen to us, if we would go out of the Space in which we live between birth and death and enter into the spacelessness in which we live between death and a new birth? What must we do? The answer is this: We must die!

We must take these words in their exact and deep meaning. On Earth we experience Time only through Space—through points in Space, through the positions of spatial things. On Earth we do not experience Time in its reality at all. Once you grasp this, you will say: “Really to enter into Time we must go out of Space, we must put away all things spatial.” You can also express it in other words, for it is really nothing else than—to die. It means, in very deed and truth: to die.

Let us now turn our eyes to this cosmic world that encircles the Earth—this cosmic world to which we are akin both through our etheric body, and also through our astral body—and let us look at the spiritual in this cosmic world. There have indeed been nations and human societies who have had regard only to the spiritual that is to be found within our earthly world of Space. Such peoples were unable to have any thoughts about repeated lives on Earth. Thoughts about repeated lives on Earth were possessed only by those human beings and groups that were able to conceive Time in its pure essence, Time in its spaceless character. But if we consider this earthly world together with its cosmic environment, or, to put it briefly, all that we speak of as the Cosmos, the Universe; and if we behold the spiritual manifest in it, we are then apprehending something of which it can be said that it had to be present in order that we might enter into our existence as earthly human beings; it had to be there.

Unfathomable depths are really contained in this simple conception,—that all that to which I have just referred, had to exist in order that we as earthly human beings might enter this earthly life. Infinite depths are revealed when we really grasp the spiritual aspect of all that is thus put before us. If we conceive this Spiritual in its completeness as a self-contained whole, if we consider it in its own purity and essence, then we have a conception of what was called “God” by those peoples who limited their outlook to the world of space alone.

These peoples—at any rate in their Wisdom-teachings—had come to feel: The Cosmos is woven through and through by a Divine element that is at work in it, and we can distinguish from this Divine element in the Cosmos that which is present, on the Earth in our immediate environment, as the physical world. We can also distinguish that which, in this cosmic, divine-spiritual world reveals itself as the Etheric, namely that which gazes down upon us in the blue of the sky. We can distinguish as the Astral in this divine world, that which gazes down upon us in the configuration of the starry heavens.

If we enter as fully as possible into the situation as we stand here, within the Universe, as human beings on this Earth, we shall say to ourselves: “We as human beings have a physical body: where, then, is the Physical in the Universe?” Here I am returning to something which I have already pointed out. The physical science of to-day expects to find everything which is on the Earth existing also in the Universe. But the physical organisation itself is not to be found in the Universe at all. Man has in the first place his physical organisation: then in addition he has the etheric and the astral. The Universe on the other hand begins with the Etheric. Out there in the Cosmos the Physical is nowhere to be found. The Physical exists only on the Earth, and it is but empty fancy and imagination to speak of anything physical in the far Universe. In the Universe there is the Etheric and the Astral. There is also a third element within the Universe which we have yet to speak about in this present lecture, for the Cosmos too is threefold. But the threefoldness of the Cosmos, apart from the Earth, is different from the threefoldness of the Cosmos in which we include the Earth.

Let these feelings enter into our earthly consciousness, the perceiving of the Physical in our immediate earthly dwelling-place; the feeling of the Etheric, which is both on the Earth and in the Universe; the beholding of the Astral, glistening down to the Earth from the stars, and most intensely of all from the Sun-star. Then, when we consider all these things and place before our souls the majesty of this world-conception, we can well understand how in ancient times, when with the old instinctive clairvoyance men did not think so abstractly, but were still able to feel the majesty of a great conception, they were led to realise: “A thought so majestic as this cannot be conceived perpetually in all its fullness. We must take hold of it at one special time, allowing it to work on the soul in its full, unfathomable glory. It will then work on in the inner depths of our human being, without being spoilt and corrupted by our surface consciousness.”—If we consider by what means the old instinctive clairvoyance gave expression to such a feeling, then out of all that combined to give truth to this thought in mankind in olden time, there remains to us to-day the institution of the Christmas Festival.

On Christmas Night, man, as he stands here upon the Earth with his physical, his etheric and his astral bodies, feels himself to be related to the threefold Cosmos, which appears to him in its Etheric nature, shining so majestically, and with the magic wonder of the night in the blue of the heavens; while face to face with him is the Astral of the Universe, in the stars that glitter in towards the Earth. As he realises how the holiness of this cosmic environment is related to that which is on the Earth itself, he feels that he himself with his own Ego has been transplanted from the Cosmos into this world of Space. And now he may gaze upon the Christmas Mystery—the new-born Child, the Representative of Humanity on Earth, who, inasmuch as he is entering into childhood, is born into this world of Space. In the fullness and majesty of this Christmas thought, as he gazes on the Child that is born on Christmas Night, he exclaims: “Ex Deo Nascimur—I am born out of the Divine, the Divine that weaves and surges through the world of Space.”

When a man has felt this, when he has permeated himself through and through with it, then he may also recall what Anthroposophy has revealed to us about the meaning of the Earth. The Child on whom we are gazing is the outer sheath of That which is now born into Space. But whence is He born, that He might be brought to birth in the world of Space? According to what we have explained to-day, it can only be from Time. From out of Time the Child is born.

If we then follow out the life of this Child and His permeation by the Spirit of the Christ-Being, we come to realise that this Being, this Christ-Being, comes from the Sun. Then we shall look up to the Sun, and say to ourselves: “As I look up to the Sun, I must behold in the sunshine that Time, which in the world of Space is hidden. Within the Sun is Time, and from out of the Time that weaves and works within the Sun, Christ came forth, came out into Space, on to the Earth.”

What have we then in Christ on Earth? In Christ on Earth we have That, which coming from beyond Space, from outside of Space, unites with the Earth.

I want you to realise how our conception of the Universe changes, in comparison with the ordinary present-day conception, when we really enter into all that has come before our souls this evening. There in the Universe we have the Sun, with all that there appears to us to be immediately connected with it—all that is contained in the blue of the heavens, in the world of the stars. At another point in the Universe we have the Earth with humanity. When we look up from the Earth to the Sun, we are at the same time looking into the flow of Time.

Now from this there follows something of great significance. Man only looks up to the Sun in the right way (even if it be but in his mind) when, as he gazes upwards, he forgets Space and considers Time alone. For in truth, the Sun does not only radiate light, it radiates Space itself, and when we are looking into the Sun we are looking out of Space into the world of Time. The Sun is the unique star that it is because when we gaze into the Sun we are looking out of Space. And from that world, outside of Space, Christ came to men. At the time when Christianity was founded by Christ on Earth, man had been all too long restricted to the mere Ex Deo Nascimur, he had become altogether bound up in it, he had become a Space-being pure and simple. The reason why it is so hard for us to understand the traditions of primeval epochs, when we go back to them with the consciousness of present-day civilisation, is that they always had in mind [Space], and not the world of [Time]. They regarded the world of [Time] only as an appendage of the world of [Space].²

Christ came to bring the element of Time again to men, and when the human heart, the human soul, the human spirit, unite themselves with Christ, then man receives once more the stream of Time that flows from Eternity to Eternity. What else can we human beings do when we die, i.e. when we go out of the world of Space, than hold fast to Him who gives Time back to us again? At the Mystery of Golgotha man had become to so great an extent a being of Space that Time was lost to him. Christ brought Time back again to men.

If, then, in going forth from the world of Space, men would not die in their souls as well as in their bodies, they must die in Christ, We can still be human beings of Space, and say: Ex Deo Nascimur, and we can look to the Child who comes forth from Time into Space, that he may unite Christ with humanity. But since the Mystery of Golgotha we cannot conceive of death, the bound of our earthly life, without this thought: “We must die in Christ.” Otherwise we shall pay for our loss of Time with the loss of Christ Himself, and, banished from Him, remain held spell-bound. We must fill ourselves with the Mystery of Golgotha. In addition to the Ex Deo Nascimur, we must find the In Christo Morimur. We must bring forth the Easter thought in addition to the Christmas thought. Thus the Ex Deo Nascimur lets the Christmas thought appear before our souls, and in the In Christo Morimur the Easter thought.

We can now say: On the Earth man has his three bodies, the physical, the etheric and the astral. The Etheric and Astral are also out there in the Cosmos, but the Physical is only to be found on the Earth. Out in the Cosmos there is no Physical. Thus we must say: On the Earth—physical, etheric, astral. In the Cosmos—no physical, but only the etheric and the astral.

Yet the Cosmos too is threefold, for what the Cosmos lacks at the lowest level, it adds above. In the Cosmos the Etheric is the lowest: on the Earth the Physical is the lowest. On Earth the Astral is the highest; in the Cosmos the highest is that of which man has to-day only the beginnings—that out of which his Spirit-Self will one day be woven. We may therefore say: In the Cosmos there is, as the third, the highest element, the Spirit-Selfhood.

Now we see the stars as expressions of something real. I compared their action to a gentle stroking. The Spirit-Selfhood that is behind them is indeed the Being that lovingly strokes,—only in this case it is not a single Being but the whole world of the Hierarchies. I gaze upon a man and see his form; I look at his eyes and see them shining towards me; I hear his voice; it is the utterance of the human being. In the same way I gaze up into the far Spaces of the world, I look upon the stars. They are the utterance of the Hierarchies,—the living utterance of the Hierarchies, kindling astral feeling. I gaze into the blue depths of the firmament and, perceive in it the outward revelation of the etheric body which is the lowest member of the whole world of the Hierarchies.

Now we may draw near to a still further realisation. We look out into the far Cosmos which goes out beyond earthly reality, even as the Earth with its physical substance and forces goes down beneath cosmic reality. As in the Physical the Earth has a sub-cosmic element, so in Spirit-Selfhood the Cosmos has a super-earthly element.

Physical science speaks of a movement of the Sun; and it can do so, for within the spatial picture of the Cosmos which surrounds us, we perceive by certain phenomena that the Sun is in movement. But that is only an image of the true Sun-movement—an image cast into Space. If we are speaking of the real Sun it is nonsense to say that the Sun moves in Space; for Space itself is being radiated out by the Sun. The Sun not only radiates the light; the Sun creates the Space itself. And the movement of the Sun is only a spatial movement within this created Space. Outside of Space it is a movement in Time. What seems apparent to us—namely, that the Sun is speeding on towards the constellation of Hercules—is only a spatial image of the Time-evolution of the Sun-Being.

To His intimate disciples Christ spoke these words: “Behold the life of the Earth; it is related to the life of the Cosmos. When you look out on the Earth and the surrounding Cosmos, it is the Father whose life permeates this Universe.³ The Father-God is the God of Space. But I make known to you that I have come to you from the Sun, from Time—Time that receives man only when he dies. I have brought you myself from out of Time.⁴ If you receive me, you receive Time, and you will not be held spell-bound in Space. But you find the transition from the one trinity—Physical, Etheric and Astral—to the other trinity, which leads from the Etheric and Astral to Spirit-Selfhood. Spirit-Selfhood is not to be found in the earthly world, just as the Earthly-Physical is not to be found in the Cosmos. But I bring you the message of it, for I am from the Sun.”

The Sun has indeed a threefold aspect. If one lives within the Sun and looks down from the Sun to the Earth, one beholds the Physical, Etheric and Astral. One may also gaze on that which is within the Sun itself. Then one still sees the Physical so long as one remembers the Earth or gazes down towards the Earth. But if one looks away from the Earth one beholds on the other side the Spirit-Selfhood. Thus one swings backwards and forwards between the Physical and the nature of the Spirit-Self. Only the Etheric and Astral in between are permanent. As you look out into the great Universe, the Earthly vanishes away, and you have the Etheric, the Astral and the Spirit-Selfhood. This is what you behold when you come into the Sun-Time between death and a new birth.

Let us now imagine first of all the inner mood of a man's soul to be such that he shuts himself up entirely within this Earth-existence. He can still feel the Divine, for out of the Divine he is born: Ex Deo Nascimur. Then let us imagine him no longer shutting himself up within the mere world of Space, but receiving the Christ who came from the world of Time into the world of Space, who brought Time itself into the earthly Space. If a man does this, then in Death he will overcome Death. Ex Deo Nascimur. In Christo Morimur. But Christ Himself brings the message that when Space is overcome and one has learned to recognise the Sun as the creator of Space, when one feels oneself transplanted through Christ into the Sun, into the living Sun, then the earthly Physical vanishes and only the Etheric and the Astral are there. Now the Etheric comes to life, not as the blue of the sky, but as the lilac-red gleaming radiance of the Cosmos, and forth from the reddish light the stars no longer twinkle down upon us but gently touch us with their loving effluence.

If a man really enters into all this, he can have the experience of himself, standing here upon the Earth, the Physical put aside, but the Etheric still with him, streaming through and out of him in the lilac-reddish light. No longer now are the stars glimmering points of light; they are radiations of love like the caressing hand of a human being. As we feel all this—the divine within ourselves, the divine cosmic fire flaming forth from within us as the very being of man; ourselves within the Etheric world and experiencing the living expression of the Spirit in the Astral cosmic radiance, there bursts forth within us the inner awakening of the creative radiance of Spirit, which is man's high calling in the Universe.

When those to whom Christ revealed these things had let the revelation sink deep into their being, then the moment came when they experienced the working of this mighty concept, in the fiery tongues of Pentecost. At first they felt the falling away, the discarding of the earthly-Physical as death. But then the feeling came; This is not death, but in place of the physical of the Earth, there now dawns upon us the Spirit-Selfhood of the Universe. “Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus.”

Thus may we regard the threefold nature of the one half of the year. We have the Christmas thought—Ex Deo Nascimur; the Easter thought—In Christo Morimur; and the Whitsun thought—Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus.

There remains the other half of the year. If we understand that too, there dawns on us the other aspect of our human life. If we understand the relationship of the physical to the soul of man and to the superphysical—which contains the true freedom of which man is to become a partaker on the Earth,—then in the interconnection of the Christmas, Easter and Whitsun festivals we understand the human freedom on Earth. As we understand man from out of these three thoughts, the Christmas thought, the Easter thought and the Whitsun thought, and as we let this kindle in us the desire to understand the remaining portions of the year, there arises the other half of human life which I indicated when I said: “Gaze upon this human destiny; the Hierarchies appear behind it—the working and weaving of the Hierarchies.” It is wonderful to look truly into the destiny of a human being, for behind it stands the whole world of the Hierarchies.

It is indeed the language of the stars which sounds towards us from the thoughts of Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide; from the Christmas thought, inasmuch as the Earth is a star within the Universe; from the Easter thought inasmuch as the most radiant of stars, the Sun, gives us his gifts of grace; and from the Whitsun thought inasmuch as that which lies hidden beyond the stars lights into the soul, and lights forth again from the soul in the fiery tongues of Pentecost.

Enter into all this, my dear friends! I have told you of the Father, the Bearer of the Christmas thought, who sends the Son that through him the Easter thought may be fulfilled; I have told you further how the Son brings the message of the Spirit, so that in the thought of Whitsun man's life on Earth may be completed in its threefold being. Meditate this through, ponder it well; then for all the descriptive foundations I have already given you for an understanding of Karma, you will gain a right foundation of inner feeling.

Try to let the Christmas, Easter and Whitsun thoughts, in the way I have expressed them to you to-day, work deeply and truly into your human feeling, and when we meet again after the journey which I must undertake this Whitsun-tide for the Course on Agriculture—when we come together again, bring this feeling with you, my dear friends. For this feeling should live on in you as the warm and fiery thought of Pentecost. Then we shall be able to go further in our study of Karma; your power of understanding will be fertilised by what the Whitsun thought contains.

Just as once upon a time at the first Whitsun Festival something shone forth from each one of the disciples, so the thought of Pentecost should now become alive again for our anthroposophical understanding. Something must light up and shine forth from our souls. Therefore it is as a Whitsun feeling, to prepare you for the further continuation of our thoughts on Karma, which are related to the other half of the year, that I have given you what I have said to-day about the inner connections of Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide.

• 1. From February until September, 1924, with intervals of visits to other towns and countries, Rudolf Steiner was giving at Dornach the great series of 49 lectures on Karma, subsequently produced in four volumes now available in English translation. The present lecture was given very shortly before the Whitsun Festival and deals with its specific significance for the problem of human destiny with which the Karma lectures deal.
  
  Lecturing as he was to Anthroposophists, Dr. Steiner begins at once with the fundamental fact of the three ‘bodies’ at work in the human organism. A full exposition of this is to be found in the book Theosophy, chapter I.
• 2. The bracketed words were transposed in the translation. Error brought to our attention by to Lucas Dreier
• 3. Cp. Paul: “God that made the world and all things therein, being Lord of heaven and earth, giveth to all life and breath and all things, and is not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and have our being.” Acts XVII, 24–28.
• 4. “Time,” as here used, is what we usually designate as “Eternity”, i.e. a continuous, unbroken time-experience. What we usually call “Time” is our spatialised concept of real Time, separate successional events, measured by spatial changes.

Yesterday I attempted to show the methods employed by Eastern spirituality for approaching the spiritual world and pointed out how anybody who wished to pursue this path into the super-sensible more or less dispensed with the bridge linking him with his fellow men. He chose a path different from that which establishes communication within society by means of language, thought, and perception of the ego. And I showed how it was initially attempted not to understand through the word what one's fellow man wished to say, what one wants to understand from him, but to live within the words. This process of living within the word was enhanced by forming the words into certain aphorisms. One lived in these and repeated them, so that the forces accrued in the soul by this process were strengthened further by repetition. And I showed how something was achieved in the condition of the soul that might be called a state of Inspiration, in the sense in which I have used the word, except that the sages of the ancient East were, of course, members of their race: their ego-consciousness was much less developed than in later epochs of human evolution. They thus entered into the spiritual world in a more instinctive manner, and because the whole thing was instinctive and thus resulted, in a sense, from a healthy drive within human nature, in the earliest times it could not lead to the pathological afflictions of which we have also spoken. In later times steps were taken by the so-called Mysteries to guard against the rise of such afflictions as I have described to you. I said that those Westerners who desire to gain knowledge of the spiritual world must approach this in another way. Humanity has progressed in the interim. Different soul faculties have evolved, so that one cannot simply renew the ancient Eastern path of spiritual development. Within the realm of spiritual life one cannot long to return in a reactionary manner to prehistoric or earlier historical periods of human evolution. For Western civilization, the path leading into the spiritual worlds is that of Imagination. This faculty of Imagination, however, must be integrated organically into the life of the soul as a whole. This can come about in the most varied ways, just as the Eastern path of development was not unequivocally predetermined but could take numerous different courses. Today I would like to describe the path into the spiritual world that conforms to the needs of Western civilization and is particularly suited to anyone immersed in the scientific life of the West.

In my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, I have described an entirely safe path leading to the super-sensible, but I describe it in such a way that it applies for everybody, above all for those who have not devoted their lives to science. Today I shall describe a path into the super-sensible that is much more for the scientist. All my experience has taught me that for such a scientist a kind of precondition for this cognitional striving is to take up what is presented in my book, Philosophy of Freedom. I will explain what I mean by this. This book, Philosophy of Freedom, was not written with the same intent as most books written today. Nowadays books are written simply in order to inform the reader of the book's subject matter, so that the reader learns the book's contents in accordance with his education, his scientific training, or the special knowledge he already possesses. This was not my primary Intention in writing Philosophy of Freedom, and thus it will not be popular with those who read books only to acquire Information. The purpose of the book is to make the reader directly engage his thinking activity on every page.

In a sense, the book is only a kind of musical score that one must read with inner thought activity in order to progress, as the result of one's own efforts, from one thought to the next. The book constantly presupposes the mental collaboration of the reader. Moreover, the book presupposes that which the soul becomes in the process of such mental exertion. Anyone who has really worked through this book with his own inner thinking activity and cannot confess that he has come to know himself in a part of his inner life in which he had not known himself previously has not read Philosophy of Freedom properly. One should feel that one is being lifted out of one's usual thinking [Vorstellen] into a thinking independent of the senses [ein sinnlichkeitsfreies Denken], in which one is fully immersed, so that one feels free of the conditions of physical existence. Whoever cannot confess this to himself has actually misunderstood the book. One should be able to say to oneself: now I know, as a result of the inner thought activity I myself have expended, what pure thinking actually is.

The strange thing is that most Western philosophers totally deny the reality of the very thing that my Philosophy of Freedom seeks to awaken as something real in the soul of the reader. Countless philosophers have expounded the view that pure thinking does not exist but is bound to contain traces, however diluted, of sense perception. A strong impression is left that philosophers who maintain this have never really studied mathematics or gone into the difference between analytical and empirical mechanics. Specialization, however, has already grown to such an extent that nowadays philosophy is often pursued by people totally lacking any knowledge of mathematical thinking. The pursuit of philosophy is actually impossible without a grasp of at least the spirit of mathematical thinking. We have seen what Goethe's attitude was toward this spirit of mathematical thinking, even though he made no claim himself to any special training in mathematics. Many thus would deny the existence of the very faculty I would like those who study The Philosophy of Freedom to acquire.

And now let us imagine a reader who simply sets about working through The Philosophy of Freedom within the context of his ordinary consciousness in the way I have described: he will, of course, not be able to claim that he has been transported into a super-sensible world. For I intentionally wrote The Philosophy of Freedom in the way that I did so that it would present itself to the world initially as a purely philosophical work. Just think what a disservice would have been accorded anthroposophically oriented spiritual science if I had begun immediately with spiritual scientific writings! These writings would, of course, have been disregarded by all trained philosophers as the worst kind of dilettantism, as the efforts of an amateur. To begin with I had to write purely philosophically. I had to present the world with something thought out philosophically in the strict sense, though it transcended the normal bounds of philosophy. At some point, however, the transition had to be made from a merely philosophical and scientific kind of writing to a spiritual scientific writing. This occurred at a time when I was invited to write a special chapter about Goethe's scientific writings for a German biography of Goethe. This was at the end of the last century, in the 1890s. And so I was to write the chapter on Goethe's scientific writings: I had, in fact, finished it and sent it to the publisher when there appeared another work of mine, called Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age. The book was a bridge between pure philosophy and an anthroposophical orientation. When this work came out, my manuscript was returned to me by the publisher, who had enclosed nothing but my fee so that I would not make a fuss, for thereby the legal obligations had been met. Among the learned pedants, there was obviously no interest in anything—not even a single chapter devoted to the development of Goethe's attitude toward natural science written by one who had authored this book on mysticism.

I will now assume that The Philosophy of Freedom has been worked through already with one's ordinary consciousness in the way described. Now we are in the right frame of mind for our souls to undertake in a healthy way what I described yesterday, if only very briefly, as the path leading into Imagination. It is possible to pursue this path in a way consonant with Western life if we attempt to surrender ourselves completely to the world of outer phenomena, so that we allow them to work upon us without thinking about them but still perceiving them. In ordinary waking life, you will agree, we are constantly perceiving, but actually in the very process of doing so we are continually saturating our percepts with concepts; in scientific thinking we interweave percepts and concepts entirely systematically, building up systems of concepts and so on. By having acquired the capacity for the kind of thinking that gradually emerges from The Philosophy of Freedom, one can become capable of such acute inner activity that one can exclude and suppress conceptual thinking from the process of perception and surrender oneself to bare percepts. But there is something else we can do in order to strengthen the forces of the soul and absorb percepts unelaborated by concepts. One can, moreover, refrain from formulating the judgments that arise when these percepts are joined to concepts and create instead symbolic images, or images of another sort, alongside the images seen by the eye, heard by the ear, and rendered by the senses of warmth, touch, and so on. If we thus bring our activity of perception into a state of flux, infusing it with life and movement, not as we do when forming concepts but by elaborating perception symbolically or artistically, we will develop much sooner the power of allowing the percepts to permeate us as such. An excellent preparation for this kind of cognition is to school oneself rigorously in what I have characterized as phenomenalism, as elaboration of phenomena. If one has really striven not to allow inertia to carry one through the veil of sense perception upon reaching the boundary of the material world, in order to look for all kinds of metaphysical explanations in terms of atoms and molecules, but has instead used concepts to set the phenomena in order and follow them through to the archetypal phenomena, one has already undergone a training that enables one to isolate the phenomena from everything conceptual. And if one still symbolizes the phenomena, turns them into images, one acquires a potent soul forte enabling one to absorb the external world free from concepts.

Obviously we cannot expect to achieve this quickly. Spiritual research demands of us far more than research in a laboratory or observatory. It demands above all an intense effort of the individual will. If one has practiced such an inner representation of symbolic images for a certain length of time and striven in addition to dwell contemplatively upon images that one keeps present in the soul in a way analogous to the mental representation of phenomena, images that otherwise only pass away when we race from sensation to sensation, from experience to experience; if one has accustomed oneself to dwell contemplatively for longer and longer periods of time upon an image that one has fully understood, that one has formed oneself or taken at somebody else's suggestion so that it cannot be a reminiscence, and if one repeats this process again and again, one strengthens one's inner soul forces and finally realizes that one experiences something of which one previously had no inkling. The only way to obtain even an approximate idea of such an experience, which takes place only in one's inner being—one must be very careful not to misunderstand this—is to recall particularly lively dream-images. One must keep in mind, however, that dream-images are always reminiscences that can never be related directly to anything external and are thus a sort of reaction coming toward one out of one's own inner self. If one experiences to the full the images formed in the way described above, this is something entirely real, and one begins to understand that one is encountering within oneself the spiritual element that actuates the processes of growth, that is the power of growth. One realizes that one has entered into apart of one's human constitution, something within one; something that unites itself with one; something that is active within but that one previously had experienced only unconsciously. Experienced unconsciously in what way?

I have told you that from birth until the change of teeth a soul-spiritual entity is at work structuring the human being and that this then emancipates itself to an extent. Later, between the change of teeth and puberty, another such soul-spiritual entity, which dips down in a way into the physical body, awakens the erotic drives and much else as well. All this occurs unconsciously. If, however, we use fully consciously such measures of soul as I have described to observe this permeation of the physical organism by the soul-spiritual, one sees how such processes work within man and how man is actually given over to the external world continually, from birth onward. Nowadays this giving-over of oneself to the external world is held to be nothing but abstract perception or abstract cognition. This is not so. We are surrounded by a world of color, sound, and warmth and by all kinds of sense impressions, By elaborating these with our concepts we create yet further impressions that have an effect on us. By experiencing all this consciously we come to see that in the unconscious experience of color- and sound-impressions that we have from childhood onward there is something spiritual that suffuses our organization. And when, for example, we take up the sense of love between the change of teeth and puberty, this is not something originating in the physical body but rather something that the cosmos gives us through the colors, sounds, and streaming warmth that reach us. Warmth is something other than warmth; light something other than light in the physical sense; sound is something other than physical sound. Through our sense impressions we are conscious only of what I would term external sound and external color. And when we surrender ourselves to nature, we do not encounter the ether-waves, atoms, and so on of which modern physics and physiology dream; rather, it is spiritual forces that are at work, forces that fashion us between birth and death into what we are as human beings. Once we tread the path of knowledge I have described, we become aware that it is the external world that forms us. We become best able to observe consciously what lives and embodies itself within us when we acquire above all a clear sense that spirit is at work in the external world. lt is of all things phenomenology that enables us to perceive how spirit works within the external world. It is through phenomenology, and not abstract metaphysics, that we attain knowledge of the spirit by consciously observing, by raising to consciousness, what otherwise we would do unconsciously, by observing how, through the sense world, spiritual forces enter our being and work formatively upon it.

Yesterday I pointed out to you that the Eastern sage in a way disregards the significance of Speech, thought, and the perception of the ego. He experiences these things differently and cultivates a different attitude of soul toward these things, because language, perception of thoughts, and perception of the ego initially tend to lead us away from the spiritual world into social contact with other human beings. In everyday physical existence we purchase our social life at the price of listening right through language, looking through thoughts, and feeling our way right through the perception of the ego. The Eastern sage took upon himself not to listen right through the word but to live within it. He took upon himself not to look right through the thought but to live within the thought, and so forth. We in the West have as our task more to contemplate man himself in following the path into super-sensible worlds.

At this point it must be remembered that man bears a certain kind of sensory organization within as well. I have already described the three inner senses through which he becomes aware of his inner being, just as he perceives what goes on outside him. We have a sense of balance by means of which we sense the spatial orientation appropriate to us as human beings and are thereby able to work inside it with our will. We have a sense of movement by means of which we know that we are moving even in the dark: we know this from an inner sensing and not merely because we perceive our changing relationship to other objects we pass. We have an actual inner sense of movement. And we have a sense of life, by means of which we can perceive our general state of well-being, the constant changes in the inner condition of our life forces. These three inner senses work together with the will during man's first seven years. We are guided by our sense of balance, and a being who initially cannot move at all and later can only crawl is transformed into one who can stand upright and walk. This ability to walk upright is effected by the sense of balance, which places us into the world. The sense of movement and the sense of life likewise contribute toward the development of our full humanity. Anybody who is capable of applying the standards of objective observation employed in the scientist's laboratory to the development of man's physical body and his soul-spirit will soon discover how the forces that worked formatively upon man principally during the fast seven years emancipate themselves and begin to assume a different aspect from the time of the change of teeth onward. By this time a person is less intensively connected to that within than he was as a child. A child is closely bound up inwardly with human equilibrium, movement, and life. Something else, however, is evolving simultaneously during this emancipation of balance, movement, and life. There takes place a certain adjustment of the three other senses: the senses of smell, taste, and touch. It is extremely interesting to observe in detail the way in which a child gradually finds his way into life, orienting himself by means of the senses of taste, smell, and touch. Of course, this can be seen most obviously in early life, but anybody trained to do so can see it clearly enough later on as well. In a certain way, the child pushes out of himself balance, movement, and life but at the same time draws more into himself the qualities of the sense of smell, the sense of taste, and the sense of touch. In the course of an extended phase of development the one is, so to speak, exhaled and the other inhaled, so that the forces of balance, movement, and life, which press from within outward, and the qualitative orientations of smell, taste, and touch, which press from without inward, meet within our organism. This is effected by the interpenetration of the two sense-triads. As a result of this interpenetration, there arises within man a firm sense of self; in this way man First experiences himself as a true ego. Now we are cut off from the spirituality of the external world by speech and by our faculties of perceiving thoughts and perceiving the egos of others—and rightly so, for if it were otherwise we could never in this physical life become social beings—in just the same way, inasmuch as the qualities of smell, taste, and touch encounter balance, movement, and life, we are inwardly cut off from the triad life, movement, and balance, which would otherwise reveal itself to us directly. The experiences of the senses of smell, taste, and touch place themselves, as it were, in front of what we would otherwise experience through our sense of balance, our sense of movement, and our sense of life. And the result of this development toward Imagination of which I have spoken consists in this: the Oriental comes to a halt at language in order to live within it; he halts at the thought in order to live there; he halts at the perception of the ego in order to live within it. By these means he makes his way outward into the spiritual world. The Oriental comes to a halt within these; we, by striving for Imagination, by a kind of absorption of external percepts devoid of concepts, engage in an activity that is in a way the opposite of that in which the Oriental engages with regard to language, perception of thoughts, and perception of the ego. The Oriental comes to a halt at these and enters into them. In striving for Imagination, however, one wends one's way through the sensations of smell, taste, and touch, penetrating into the inner realm so that, by one's remaining undisturbed by sensations of smell, taste, and touch, the experiences stemming from balance, movement, and life come forth to meet one.

It is a great moment when one has penetrated through what I have described as the sense-triad of taste, smell, and touch, and one confronts the naked essence of movement, balance, and life.

With such a preparation behind us, it is interesting to study what Western mysticism often sets forth. Most certainly, I am very far from decrying the elements of poetry, beauty, and imaginative expression in the writings of many mystics. I most certainly admire what, for instance, St. Theresa, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and others have to tell us, and indeed Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler. But all that arises in this way reveals itself to the true spiritual scientist as something that arises when one traverses the inward-leading path yet does not penetrate beyond the region of smell, taste, and touch. Read what has been written by individuals who have described with particular clarity what they have experienced in this way. They speak of a tasting of that within, of a tasting regarding what exists as soul-spirit in man's inner being; they also speak of a smelling and, in a certain sense, of a touching. And anybody who knows how to read Mechthild of Magdeburg, for instance, or St. Theresa, in the right way will see that they follow this inward path but never penetrate right through taste, smell, and touch. They use beautiful poetic imagery for their descriptions, but they are speaking only of how one can touch, savor, and sniff oneself inwardly.

For it is far less agreeable to see the true nature of reality with senses that are developed truly spiritually than to read the accounts given by voluptuous mysticism—the only term for it—which in the final analysis only gratifies a refined, inward-looking egotism of soul. As I say, much as this mysticism is to be admired—and I do admire it—the true spiritual scientist must realize that it stops halfway: what is manifest in the splendid poetic imagery of Mechthild of Magdeburg, St. Theresa, and the others is really only what is smelt, tasted, and touched before breaking through into the actual inner realm. Truth is occasionally unpleasant, and at times perhaps even cruel, but modern humanity has no business becoming rickety in soul by following a nebulous, imperfect mysticism. What is required today is to penetrate into man's true inner nature with strength of spirit, with the same strength we have achieved in a much more disciplined way for the external world by pursuing natural science. And it is not in vain that we have achieved this. Natural science must not be undervalued! Indeed, we must seek to acquire the disciplined and methodical side of natural science. And it is precisely when one has assimilated this scientific method that one appreciates the achievements of a nebulous mysticism at their true worth, but one also knows that this nebulous mysticism is not what spiritual science must foster. On the contrary, the task of spiritual science is to seek clear comprehension of man's own inner being, whereby a clear, spiritual understanding of the external world is made possible in turn.

I know that if I did not speak in the way that truth demands I could enjoy the support of every nebulous, blathering mystic who takes up mysticism in order to satisfy his voluptuous soul. That cannot be our concern here, however; rather, we must seek forces that can be used for life, spiritual forces that are capable of informing our scientific and social life.

When one has penetrated as far as that which lives in the sense of balance, the sense of life, and the sense of movement, one has reached something that one experiences initially as the true inner being of man because of its transparency. The very nature of the thing shows us that we cannot penetrate any deeper. But then again one has more than enough at this initial stage, for what we discover is not the stuff of nebulous, mystical dreams. What one finds is a true organology, and above all one finds within oneself the essence of that which is within equilibrium, of that which is in movement, of that which is suffused with life. One finds this within oneself.

Then, after experiencing this, something entirely extraordinary has occurred. Then, at the appropriate moment, one begins to notice something. An essential prerequisite is, as I have said, to have thought through The Philosophy of Freedom beforehand. This is then left, so to speak, to one side, while pursuing the inner path of contemplation, of meditation. One has advanced as far as balance, movement, and life. One lives within this life, this movement, this balance. Entirely parallel with our pursuit of the way of contemplation and meditation but without any other activity on our part, our thinking regarding The Philosophy of Freedom has undergone a transformation. What can be experienced in such a philosophy of freedom in pure thinking has, as a result of our having worked inwardly on our souls in another sphere, become something utterly different. lt has become fuller, richer in content. While on the one hand we have penetrated into our inner being and have deepened our power of Imagination, on the other hand we have raised what resulted from our mental work on The Philosophy of Freedom up out of ordinary consciousness. Thoughts that formerly had floated more or less abstractly within pure thinking have been transformed into substantial forces that are alive in our consciousness: what once was pure thought is now Inspiration. We have developed Imagination, and pure thinking has become Inspiration. Following this path further, we become able to keep apart what we have gained following two paths that must be sharply differentiated: on the one hand, what we have obtained as Inspiration from pure thinking—the life that at a lower level is thinking, and then becomes a thinking raised to Inspiration—and on the other hand what we experience as conditions of equilibrium, movement, and life. Now we can bring these modes of experience together. We can unite the inner with the outer. The fusion of Imagination and Inspiration brings us in turn to Intuition. What have we accomplished now? Well, I would like to answer this question by approaching it from another side. First of all I must draw attention to the steps taken by the Oriental who wishes to rise further after having schooled himself by means of the mantras, after having lived within the language, within the word. He now learns not only to live in the rhythms of language but also in a certain way to experience breathing consciously, in a certain way to experience breathing artificially by altering it in the most varied ways. For him this is the next highest step—but again not something that can be taken over directly by the West. What does the Eastern student of yoga attain by surrendering himself to conscious, regulated, varied breathing? Oh, he experiences something quite extraordinary when he inhales. When inhaling he experiences a quality of air that is not found when we experience air as a purely physical substance but only when we unite ourselves with the air and thus comprehend it spiritually. As he breathes in, a genuine student of yoga experiences something that works formatively upon his whole being, that works spiritually; something that does not expend itself in the life between birth and death, but, entering into us through the spirituality of the outer air, engenders in us something that passes with us through the portal of death. To experience the breathing process consciously means taking part in something that persists when we have laid aside the physical body. For to experience the breathing process consciously is to experience the reaction of our inner being to inhalation. In experiencing this we experience something that preceded birth in our existence as soul-spirit—or let us say preceded our conception—something that had already cooperated in shaping us as embryos and then continued to work within our organism in childhood. To grasp the breathing process consciously means to comprehend ourselves beyond birth and death. The advance from an experience of the aphorism and the word to an experience of the breathing process represented a further penetration into an inspired comprehension of the eternal in man. We Westerners must experience much the same thing—but in a different sphere.

What, in fact, is the process of perception? It is nothing but a modified process of inhalation. As we breathe in, the air presses upon our diaphragm and upon the whole of our being. Cerebral fluid is forced up through the spinal column into the brain. In this way a connection is established between breathing and cerebral activity. And the part of the breathing that can be discerned as active within the brain works upon our sense activity as perception. Perception is thus a kind of branch of inhalation. In exhalation, on the other hand, cerebral fluid descends and exerts pressure on the circulation of the blood. The descent of cerebral fluid is bound up with the activity of the will and also of exhalation. Anybody who really studies The Philosophy of Freedom, however, will discover that when we achieve pure thinking, thinking and willing coincide. Pure thinking is fundamentally an expression of will. Thus pure thinking turns out to be related to what the Oriental experienced in the process of exhalation. Pure thinking is related to exhalation just as perception is related to inhalation. We have to go through the same process as the yogi but in a way that is, so to speak, pushed back more into the inner life. Yoga depends upon a regulation of the breathing, both inhalation and exhalation, and in this way comes into contact with the eternal in man. What can Western man do? He can raise into clear soul experiences perception on the one hand and thinking on the other. He can unite in his inner experience perception and thinking, which are otherwise united only abstractly, formally, and passively, so that inwardly, in his soul-spirit, he has the same experience as he has physically in breathing in and out. Inhalation and exhalation are physical experiences: when they are harmonized, one consciously experiences the eternal. In everyday life we experience thinking and perception. By bringing mobility into the life of the soul, one experiences the pendulum, the rhythm, the continual interpenetrating vibration of perception and thinking. A higher reality evolves for the Oriental in the process of inhalation and exhalation; the Westerner achieves a kind of breathing of the soul-spirit in place of the physical breathing of the yogi. He achieves this by developing within himself the living process of modified inhalation in perception and modified exhalation in pure thinking, by weaving together concept, thinking, and perceiving. And gradually, by means of this rhythmic pulse, by means of this rhythmic breathing process in perception and thinking, he struggles to rise up to spiritual reality in Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. And when I indicated in my book The Philosophy of Freedom, at first only philosophically, that reality arises out of the interpenetration of perception and thinking, I intended, because the book was meant as a schooling for the soul, to show what Western man can do in order to enter the spiritual world itself. The Oriental says: systole, diastole; inhalation, exhalation. In place of these the Westerner must put perception and thinking. Where the Oriental speaks of the development of physical breathing, we in the West say: development of a breathing of the soul-spirit within the cognitional process through perception and thinking.

All this had to be contrasted with what can be experienced as a kind of dead end in Western spiritual evolution. Let me explain what I mean. In 1841 Michelet, the Berlin philosopher, published posthumously Hegel's works on natural philosophy. Hegel had worked at the end of the eighteenth century, together with Schelling, at laying the foundations of a system of natural philosophy. Schelling, as a young firebrand, had constructed his natural philosophy in a remarkable way out of what he called “intellectual Intuition” [intellektuale Anschauung]. He reached a point, however, where he could make no further progress. He immersed himself in the mystics at a certain point. His work, Bruno, or Concerning the Divine and Natural Principle in Things, and his fine treatise on human freedom and the origin of evil testify so wonderfully to this immersion. But for all this he could make no progress and began to hold back from expressing himself at all. He kept promising to follow up with a philosophy that would reveal the true nature of those hidden forces at which his earlier natural philosophy had only hinted. When Michelet published Hegel's natural philosophy in 1841, Schelling's long-expected and oft-promised “philosophy of revelation” had still not been vouchsafed to the public. He was summoned to Berlin. What he h ad to offer, however, was not the actual spirit that was to permeate the natural philosophy he had founded. He had striven for an intellectual intuition. He ground to a halt at this point, because he was unable to use Imagination to enter the sphere of which I spoke to you today. And so he was stuck there. Hegel, who had a more rational intellect, had taken over Schelling's thoughts and carried them further by applying pure thinking to the observation of nature. That was the origin of Hegel's natural philosophy. And so one had Schelling's unfulfilled promise to bring forth nature out of the spirit, and then one had Hegel's natural philosophy, which was discarded by science in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was misunderstood, to be sure, but it was bound to remain so, because it was impossible to gain any kind of connection to the ideas contained in Hegel's natural philosophy with regard to phenomenology, the true observation of nature. It is a kind of wonderful incident: Schelling traveling from Munich to Berlin, where great things are expected of him, and it turns out that he has nothing to say. It was a disappointment for all who believed that through Hegel's natural philosophy revelations about nature would emerge from pure thinking. Thus it was in a way demonstrated historically, in that Schelling had attained the level of intellectual intuition but not that of genuine Imagination and in that Hegel showed as well that if pure thinking does not lead on to Imagination or to Inspiration—that is, to the level of nature's secrets ... it was shown that the evolution of the West had thereby run up against a dead end. There was as yet nothing to counter what had come over from the Orient and engendered skepticism; one could counter with nothing that was suffused with the spirit. And anyone who had immersed himself lovingly in Schelling and Hegel and has thus been able to see, with love in his heart, the limitations of Western philosophy, had to strive for anthroposophy. He had to strive to bring about an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science for the West, so that we will possess something that works creatively in the spirit, just as the East had worked in the spirit through systole and diastole in their interaction. We in the West can allow perception and thinking to resound through one another in the soul-spirit [das geistig-seelische Ineinanderklingenlassen], through which we can rise to something more than a merely abstract science. It opens the way to a living science, which is the only kind of science that enables us to dwell within the element of truth. After all the failures of the Kantian, Schellingian, and Hegelian philosophies, we need a philosophy that, by revealing the way of the spirit, can show the real relationship between truth and science, a spiritualized science, in which truth can really live to the great benefit of future human evolution.

[ 1 ] In this chapter we shall describe a number of cases from the practice of the Clinical and Therapeutic Institute at Arlesheim. They will show how, with the help of a knowledge of spiritual man, it is possible to achieve such a thorough picture of the disease that diagnosis directly teaches us the remedy which should be used. Fundamental to this is a view which recognizes the process of illness and of healing as one complete cycle. The illness begins with an irregularity in the composition of the human organism with respect to its parts, which have been described in this book. It has already reached a certain stage when the patient is received for treatment. Our object must now be to bring about a reversal of all the processes which have taken place in the organism since the beginning of the illness, so that we arrive at length at the previous state of health of the organism. A process of this kind, reversing on itself, cannot be accomplished without the organism as a whole undergoing some loss in the forces of growth, which are equivalent to those forces which the human organism - needs during childhood in order to increase in size. The therapeutic substances must therefore be so composed as not only to bring the diseased process back to its starting-point, but also to support the reduced vitality again. To some extent this latter effect must be left to dietary treatment. But as a general rule, in the more serious cases of illness, the organism is not in a condition to evolve sufficient vitality in the assimilation of its food. Therefore the actual treatment will also have to be constituted so as to give the organism the necessary support in this respect. In the typical remedies supplied by our clinical/therapeutic institutes, this provision has been made throughout. Hence it will only be realized on closer inspection, why a given preparation contains particular constituents. In estimating the course of the disease, not only the localized pathological process, but the changes suffered by the organism as a whole must be considered and included in the reversing process. How this is to be conceived in detail will be shown by the individual cases we shall now describe. We shall then continue the more general considerations.

First Case

[ 2 ] A twenty-six years old woman patient. The whole personality reveals an extraordinarily labile condition. It is clear from the patient that that part of the organism, which we have here called the astral body, is in a state of excessive activity. One observes that the ego-organization has only slight control over the astral body. As soon as the patient begins to do some work, the astral body develops a state of agitation. The ego-organization tries to make itself felt, but is constantly repulsed. This causes the temperature to rise in such a case. A well regulated digestion depends mainly on a normal ego-organization. The impotence of this patient's ego-organization expresses itself in an obstinate constipation. The migraine-like conditions and vomiting from which she suffers are a consequence of this disturbance in the digestive activity. In sleep, her impotent ego-organization shows itself in a deficient organic activity from below upward and impaired expiration. The consequence is an excessive accumulation of carbonic acid in the organism during sleep, which shows itself organically in palpitations on awakening; psychologically in anxiety, and screaming. Physical examination can show nothing other than a lack of those forces which bring about a regular connection of the astral, etheric and physical bodies. Owing to the excessive activity of the astral body in itself, too little of its powers can flow over into the physical and the etheric. The latter, therefore, have remained too delicate in their development during the period of growth. This has shown itself on examination in the patient's slight build and weak body, and also in the fact that she complains of frequent back pain. The latter arises because in the activity of the spinal cord the ego-organization must make itself felt most. The patient talks of many dreams. The reason is that the astral body, separated in sleep from the physical and the etheric, unfolds its own excessive activity. We must start with the fact that the ego-organization needs to be strengthened and the over-activity of the astral body lowered. The former is attained by selecting a remedy that is suitable to support the weakened ego-organization in the digestive tract. Such a remedy is to be found in copper. Applied in the form of a copper ointment compress to the region of the loins, it has a strengthening effect on the deficient inner warmth coming from the ego-organization. This is observed in a reduction of the abnormal activity of the heart and the disappearance of anxiety. The excessive activity of the astral body in itself is combated by the smallest doses of lead taken orally. Lead draws the astral body together and awakens in it the forces through which it unites more intensely with the physical body and the etheric. (Lead poisoning is composed of an over-intense union of the astral with the etheric and physical bodies, so that the latter are made subject to excessive breakdown processes.) The patient recovered visibly under this treatment. Her labile condition gave way to a certain inner firmness and assurance. Her moods, recovering from their disrupted state, grew inwardly calm and contented. The constipation and back pain disappeared; likewise the migrainous conditions and the headaches. The patient's capacity for work was restored.

Second Case

[ 3 ] A forty-eight year old man. He had been a robust child with an active inner life. During the war, as he informed us, he had undergone a five months' treatment for nephritis and been discharged as cured. Married at the age of thirty-five, he had five healthy children; a sixth child died at birth. At the age of thirty-three, as a consequence of mental overwork, he began to suffer from depression, tiredness and apathy. These conditions increased continuously. At the same time he began to feel spiritual despair. He is confronted by questions, in which his profession—that of a teacher—appears to him in a negative light, which he cannot meet with anything positive. The illness shows an astral body which has too little affinity with the etheric and physical, and is rigid in itself. The physical and etheric bodies are thus enabled to assert their own inherent qualities. The feeling of the etheric not being rightly united with the astral body gives rise to states of depression; while the deficient union with the physical produces fatigue and apathy. That the patient is in a state of spiritual despair is due to the fact that the astral body cannot make use of the physical and the etheric. Consistently with all this, his sleep is good; for the astral body has little connection with the etheric and physical. For the same reason he has great difficulty in waking up. The astral body is loath to enter the physical. It is only in the evening, when the physical and etheric bodies are tired, that their normal union with the astral begins to take place. Therefore the patient becomes properly awake in the evening. This whole condition indicates that it is necessary first of all to strengthen the astral body in its activity. This can always be attained by giving arsenic internally in the form of a mineral water. It becomes clear that the particular individual is seen to gain more command over his body after some time. The connection between the astral and the etheric is strengthened; the depression, apathy and fatigue cease. But the physical body also, which through its long defective union with the astral has become sluggish and immobile, must be helped; this is done by giving treatment with a mild dose of phosphorous. Phosphorous supports the ego-organization, enabling it to overcome the resistance of the physical body. Rosemary baths are used to open a way out for the accumulated products of metabolism. Curative eurythmy re-establishes the harmony of the individual members of the organism (nerve-sense system, rhythmic system, motor and metabolic system), impaired as they are by the inaction of the astral body. Finally, by giving the patient elder-flower tea, the metabolism, which has gradually become sluggish owing to the inactivity of the astral body, is restored to a normal condition. We were able to observe a complete cure in this case.

Third Case

[ 4 ] This patient was a musician, thirty-one years old, who visited our clinic during a concert tour. He was suffering from a severe inflammatory and functional disturbance of the urinary tract, catarrhal symptoms, fever, excessive bodily fatigue, general weakness, and incapacity for work.

[ 5 ] The past history of the patient showed that he had repeatedly suffered the same condition. Examination of the patient's spiritual state revealed a hypersensitive and exhausted astral body. The susceptibility of the physical and etheric body to catarrhal and inflammatory conditions was a consequence of this. Already as a child, the patient had a weak physical body, badly supported by the astral. Hence measles, scarlet fever, chicken-pox, whooping-cough and frequent attacks of sore throat; at the age of fourteen, there was an inflammation of the urethra, which recurred at the age of twenty-nine in conjunction with cystitis. At the age of eighteen, pneumonia and pleurisy; at twenty-nine, pleurisy again, following on an attack of influenza; and at the age of thirty, catarrhal inflammation of the frontal sinus. There is also a perpetual tendency to conjunctivitis.

During the two months which he spent at our hospital the patient's temperature curve rose at first to 39.9¡C, after which, it descended, only to rise again on the fourteenth day; it then fluctuated between 37¡ and 36¡, occasionally rising above 37¡ and falling to 35¡. Such a temperature curve gives a clear picture of the changing states of the ego organisations. Such a curve arises when the effects of the semi-conscious contents of the ego-organization find expression in the warmth-processes of the physical and etheric bodies without being reduced to a normal rhythm by the astral. In this patient, the whole capacity of action of the astral body was concentrated on the rhythmic system, where it found expression in his artistic talent. The other systems fell short. As a significant result of this, the patient suffers from severe fatigue and insomnia during the summer. In the summer season, considerable demands are made upon the astral body by the outer world. Its inner capacity for activity recedes. The forces of the physical and etheric body become predominant. In the general perception of one's sense of well being, this manifests as severe fatigue. At the same time the weakened capacity for action of the astral body hinders its separation from the physical. Hence the insomnia. The deficient separation of the astral body from the etheric finds expression in anxious and unpleasant dreams, arising from the sensitivity of the etheric body to the lesions in the physical organism. Characteristically, the dreams symbolize these lesions in images of mutilated human beings. Their terrifying aspect is simply their natural quality and emphasis of feeling. As a consequence of the astral body functioning deficiently in the metabolic system, there is a tendency to constipation. And owing to the independence of the etheric body, which is too little influenced by the astral, the protein received as food cannot be completely transformed from vegetable and animal protein into human. Hence, protein is excreted in the urine, so that it is positive for albumen. If the astral body is functioning deficiently, processes will arise in the physical body which are really foreign processes in the human organism. Such processes express themselves in the formation of pus. This represents, as it were, an extra-human process within the human being. Thus in the sediment of the urine we actually find pure pus. But this formation of pus is accompanied by a parallel process in the soul. The astral body works as little psychically on the experiences of life, as it works physically on the substances of food. While extra-human substances are produced in the form of pus, mental and psychic contents of a extra-human character arise at the same time, as a keen interest in abnormal relationships of life, forebodings, premonitions and the like. We therefore set out to bring a balancing, purifying and strengthening influence to bear upon the astral body. As the ego organization is very much alive, its activity could be used, in a manner of speaking, as a carrier of the therapeutic remedy. The ego-organization, which is directed toward the external world, is most readily approached by influences whose direction is from without inward. This is achieved by the use of compresses. We first apply a compress of Melilotus, a remedy which works upon the astral body in such a way as to improve the balance and distribution of its forces, counteracting their one-sided concentration on the rhythmic system. Naturally the compresses must not be applied to that part of the body where the rhythmic system is especially concentrated. We applied them to the organs where the metabolic and motor systems are concentrated. We avoided compresses around the head, because the mood swings of the ego-organizations proceeding from the head, would have paralysed the effect. For the Melilotus to take effect, it was also necessary to assist the astral body and ego-organization, by drawing them together. This we sought to do by the addition of oxalic acid, derived from Radix bardanae. Oxalic acid works in such a way as to transform the activity of the ego-organization into that of the astral body. In addition, we gave oral remedies in very diluted doses; with the object of bringing the excretions into a regular connection with the influences of the astral body. We tried to normalise the excretions directed from the head organization by means of potassium sulphate. Those processes that depend upon the metabolic system in the narrower sense of the word, we sought to influence by potassium carbonate. We regulated the excretion of urine with Teucrium. We therefore gave a medicament, consisting of equal parts of potassium sulphate, potassium carbonate and Teucrium. The whole treatment had to reckon with a very labile balance in the whole, physical, psychical and spiritual organism. Thus we had to provide complete bed rest for physical rest, and mental quiet for spiritual balance; this alone made possible the proper interaction of the various remedies. Movement and agitation render such a complicated therapeutic process almost impossible. On completion of the treatment, the patient was restored to bodily strength and vigour, and was mentally in good condition. With such a labile state of health, it goes without saying that any external disruption may bring about a recurrence of one or another disturbance. It is part of the total treatment that in such a case such events should be avoided.

Fourth Case

[ 6 ] A child, who was brought to our clinic twice, first at the age of four, and then at the age of five and a half years. Also the mother of the child, and the mother's sister. Diagnosis led us from the illness of the child to that of her mother and of the sister. As for the child, we received the following information: it was a twin, born six weeks prematurely. The other twin died in the last stage of foetal life. At the age of six weeks, the child was taken ill, began to scream excessively, and was admitted to hospital. They diagnosed pyloric stenosis. The child was partly breast fed by a wet nurse and partly fed artificially. At the age of eight months it left the hospital. On the first day after arrival home the child had a convulsion, which recurred daily for the next two months. During the attacks the child became stiff, with the eyes deviated. The attacks were preceded by fear and crying. The child also squinted with the right eye and vomited before the attack began. At the age of two and a half years there was another attack lasting five hours. The child was again stiff and lay there as though dead. At the age of four there was an attack lasting half an hour. According to the report we received, this was the first attack which was seen to be accompanied by fever. After the convulsions that had followed directly on the return from hospital, the parents had noticed a paralysis of the right arm and the right leg. At two and a half the child made the first attempt to walk, but was only able to step out with the left leg, dragging the right after it. The right arm, too, remained without volition. The same state prevailed when the child was brought to us. Our first concern was to determine the condition of the child with respect to the members of the human organization. This was attempted independently of the syndrome. We found a severe atrophy of the etheric body, which, in certain parts, received only a very slight influence from the astral body. The region of the right chest was as though paralysed in the etheric body. On the other hand, there was a kind of hypertrophy of the astral body in the region of the stomach. The next thing was to establish the relation between this diagnosis and the syndrome. There could be no doubt that the astral body strongly involved the stomach during the process of digestion, which, however, owing to the paralysed condition of the etheric body was blocked at the transition from the gut to the lymph. Hence the blood was under-nourished. We thus attached great importance to the symptoms of nausea and vomiting. Convulsions always occur when the etheric body becomes atrophied and the astral gains a direct influence over the physical without the mediation of the etheric body. This was present to the greatest extent in the child. Moreover, if, as in this case, the condition becomes permanent during the period of growth, those processes which prepare the motor system to receive the will normally fail to take place. This showed itself in the uselessness on the right side in the child. We had now to relate the condition of the child to that of the mother. The latter was thirty-seven years old when she came to us. At the age of thirteen, she told us, she had already reached her present size. She had bad teeth at an early age, and had suffered in childhood from rheumatic fever, and maintained that she had had rickets. Menstruation began comparatively early. At the age of sixteen she had had a disease of the kidneys and she told of convulsive conditions which she had had. At twenty-five she had constipation owing to cramp in the sphincter ani, which had to be stretched. Even now she suffered from cramp on defaecation. Diagnosis by direct observation, without drawing any conclusions from this syndrome, revealed a condition extraordinarily similar to that of the child. But everything appeared in a far milder form. We must bear in mind that the human etheric body has its special period of development between the change of teeth and puberty. In the mother this expressed itself thus: with their deficient strength, the available forces of the etheric body enabled growth to take place only until puberty. At puberty the special development of the astral body begins and, being hypertrophied, now overwhelms the etheric body and takes hold of the physical organization too intensely. This showed itself in the arrest of growth at the thirteenth year. The patient was, however, by no means dwarf-like, on the contrary, she was very big; this was because the growth forces of the etheric body, deficient though they were, had worked uninhibited by the astral body and so brought about a large expansion of the volume of the physical body. But these forces had not been able to enter properly into the functions of the physical body. This showed itself in the appearance of rheumatic fever and, at a later stage, convulsions. Owing to the weakness of the etheric body there was a particularly strong influence of the astral body on the physical. Now this influence is a disintegrating one. In the course of normal development it is balanced by the regenerative forces during sleep, when the astral body is separated from the physical and the etheric. If, as in this case, the etheric body is too weak, the result is an excess of disintegration, which showed itself in the fact that she had the first filling already in the twelfth year. Moreover, if great demands are made on the etheric body as in pregnancy, on every such occasion the condition of the teeth grows worse. The weakness of the etheric body with respect to its connection with the astral was also shown by the frequency of the patient's dreams and by the sound sleep which she enjoyed in spite of all irregularities. Again the weakness of the etheric body shows itself in that foreign processes unmastered by the etheric take place in the physical body, and reveal themselves in the urine as protein, isolated hyaline casts, and salts.

[ 7 ] Very remarkable was the relationship of these disease-processes in the mother with those of her sister. As to the composition of the members of the human being, diagnosis revealed almost exactly the same. A feebly working etheric body and hence a preponderance of the astral. The astral body was, however, weaker than that of the mother. Accordingly, menstruation had begun early as in the former case, but instead of inflammatory conditions she had only pains due to an irritation of the organs, e.g. the joints. In the joints the etheric body must be particularly active if the vitality is to go on in the normal way. If the activity of the etheric body is weak, that of the physical body will predominate, a fact which appeared in this case in the swollen joints and in chronic arthritis. The weakness of the astral body, that did not work enough in the subjective feeling, was indicated by her liking for sweet dishes, which enhanced the experience of the astral body. When the weak astral body is exhausted at the end of the day, then, if the weakness persists, the pains will increase in intensity. Thus the patient complained of increased pain in the evening. The connection between the pathological conditions of these three patients points to the generation preceding that of the two sisters, and more especially to the grandmother of the child. It is here that the real cause must be sought. The disordered equilibrium between the astral and etheric bodies in all three patients can only have been founded in a similar condition in the grandmother of the child. This irregularity must have been due to a deficiency of the embryonic organs of nutrition, especially the allantois development by the astral and etheric bodies of the grandmother. A deficient development of the allantois must be looked for in all three patients. We determined this to begin with by purely spiritual-scientific methods. The physical allantois, passing into the spiritual realm, is metamorphosed into the effectiveness of the forces of the astral body. A degenerated allantois gives rise to a lessened efficiency of the astral body, which will express itself, especially, in all the motor organs. Such was the case in all three patients. It is indeed possible to recognize, from the constitution of the astral body that of the allantois. From this it will be seen that our reference to the preceding generation was not the result of drawing far-fetched conclusions, but of real spiritual-scientific observations.

[ 8 ] To anyone who is irritated by this fact, we would say that our statements here are not inspired by any love of paradox; rather by the wish not to withhold existing knowledge from anyone. Conceptions of heredity will always remain dark and mystical, as long as we shrink from recognizing the metamorphosis from the physical to the spiritual and vice-versa, which takes place in the sequence of the generations.

[ 9 ] Therapeutically, such an insight could of course only lead us to perceive the right starting-point for a healing process. Had not our attention thus been drawn to the hereditary aspect, had we merely observed the irregularity in the connection between the astral and etheric bodies, we should have used therapeutic substances which affect both these members of the human being. Such remedies however would have been ineffective in our case, for the damage, running through the generations, was too deep-seated to be made good within the etheric and astral bodies themselves. In a case like this, one must work on the organization of the ego; here it is, that one must bring to bear all those influences which relate to a harmonizing and strengthening of the etheric and astral bodies. One can achieve this if one gains access to the ego-organization through intensified sensory stimuli, (Sensory stimuli work upon the ego-organization.) For the child, we attempted this in the following way: we bandaged the right hand with a 5% iron pyrites ointment and simultaneously we massaged the left half of the head with ointment of Amanita caesarea. Externally applied, pyrites, compound of iron and sulphur, has the effect of stimulating the ego-organization to make the astral body more alive and increase its affinity to the etheric. The Amanita substance, with its peculiar content of organized nitrogen, gives rise to an influence proceeding from the head, which, working through the ego-organization, makes the etheric body more alive and increases its affinity to the astral. The healing process was supported by curative eurythmy, which moves the ego-organization as such into quickened activity. This brings what is externally applied into the depths of the organization. Initiated in this way, the healing process was then intensified, with remedies making the astral and etheric bodies especially sensitive to the influence of the ego-organization. In rhythmic daily succession we gave a decoction of solidago in baths, massaged the back with a decoction of Stellaria media and gave orally willow bark tea (which particularly affects the receptivity of the astral body) and stannum 0.001 (which particularly makes the etheric body receptive). We also gave diluted doses of poppy juice, to allow the damaged organization to give place to the healing influences. In the mother's case, the latter kind of treatment was mainly adopted, since the inherited forces had worked far less than in the succeeding generation. The same applied to the sister of the mother. While the child was still with us in the clinic, we established that it became more easily guided and the general psychological condition was improved. It grew far more obedient, for example; movements which it had carried out very clumsily, it now accomplished with greater skill. Subsequently the aunt reported that a great change had taken place in the child. It had grown quieter and the excess of involuntary movements had decreased; the child is now sufficiently adroit to be able to play by itself, psychologically the former obstinacy has disappeared.

Fifth Case

[ 10 ] A woman patient, twenty-six years old, came to our clinic suffering from the serious consequences of influenza and bronchitis which she had undergone in 1918; this had been preceded in 1917 by pleurisy. Following the influenza, she had never properly recovered. In 1920 she was very emaciated and weak, with a slight temperature and night sweats. Soon after the influenza, back-pains began, which worsened continuously up to the end of 1920. Then, with violent pain, a curvature in the lumbar region became apparent. At the same time there was a swelling of the right forefinger. A rest cure had considerably lessened the back-pains. When the patient came to us, she was suffering from a cold abscess on the right thigh; her body was distended with slight ascites. There were catarrhal sounds over the apices of both lungs. Digestion and appetite were good. The urine was concentrated, with traces of protein. Spiritual-scientific investigation revealed a hypersensitivity of the astral body and the ego-organization; such an abnormality expresses itself to begin with in the etheric body, which produces, in place of the etheric functions proper, an etheric impress of the astral functions. The astral functions are destructive. Thus, the vitality and the normal process of the physical organs showed themselves to be stunted. This is always connected with processes occurring to some extent outside man, but taking place in the human organism. Hence the cold abscess, the lumbar pains, the distended abdomen, the catarrhal symptoms in the lungs, and also the deficient assimilation of protein. The treatment must therefore seek to reduce the sensitivity of the astral body and the ego-organization. This may be done by administering silicic acid, which always strengthens the inherent forces against sensitivity. In this case we gave powdered silicic acid in the food and in enemata. We also diverted the sensitivity by applying mustard plasters to the lower back. The effect of this depends upon the fact that it induces sensitivity of its own accord, thus relieving the astral body and ego-organization of theirs. By a process which damps down the over-sensitivity of the astral body in the digestive tract, we were able to divert the astral activity to the etheric body where it ought normally to be. We achieved this by minute doses of copper and carbo animalis. The possibility that the etheric body might withdraw from the normal activity of digestion, to which it was unaccustomed, was countered by administering pancreatic fluid.

[ 11 ] The cold abscess was punctured several times. Large quantities of pus were evacuated by aspiration. The abscess grew smaller and the distended stomach decreased in that the pus-formation grew continuously less and finally disappeared. While it was still flowing we were surprised one day by a renewed rise in temperature. This was not inexplicable to us, since, with the above-described constitution of the astral body, small psychological excitements could give rise to such fever. However, one must differentiate between the explanation of fever in such cases and its strongly harmful effect. For under these conditions, such a fever is the mediator for a profound intervention of the processes of destruction in the organism. One must provide at once for a strengthening of the etheric body, which will then paralyse the harmful effects of the astral. We gave high potency silver injections and the fever sank. The patient left the clinic with a twenty pounds' increase in weight, and in a stronger condition. We are under no illusion as to the necessity for further treatment to consolidate the cure.

Interpolation

[ 12 ] With the cases hitherto described, we wished to characterize the principles whereby we seek to find the therapeutic substances out of the diagnosis. For the sake of clear illustration we selected cases where it was necessary to proceed along very individual lines. But we have also prepared typical therapeutic substances applicable to typical diseases. We will now deal with a few cases where such typical medicaments were used.

Sixth Case. Treatment of Hay Fever.

[ 13 ] We had a patient with severe symptoms of hay fever. He had suffered with it from childhood. He came to us for treatment in his fortieth year. For this disorder we have our preparation “Gencydo”. This we used in this case at the time—the month of May—when the disease was at its worst. We treated him with injections and locally by painting the inside of the nose with “Gencydo” fluid. Following this there was a marked improvement, at a time of the year when formerly the patient had suffered severely from hay fever, undertaking a journey, he reported feeling incomparably better than in former years. In the hay fever season of the next year, he was travelling again from America to Europe and only had a far milder attack than previously. The repetition of the treatment achieved a tolerable condition for this year. For a thorough cure, treatment was repeated the next year, although he had no actual attack. In the fourth year the patient himself described his condition in the following words: “In the spring of 1923, I again began the treatment, as I was expecting fresh attacks. I found my nasal mucous membranes far less sensitive than before. I had to spend my time working among flowering grasses and pollen-producing trees. I also had to ride all through the summer along hot and dusty roads. Yet with the exception of a single day, no symptoms of hay fever occurred the whole summer, and I have every reason to believe that on that single day it was an ordinary cold, not an attack of hay fever. In thirty-five years this was the first time that I could stay and work unhindered in an environment where in former years I experienced real hell.”

Seventh Case. Treatment of Sclerosis.

[ 14 ] A woman patient, sixty-one years old, came to our clinic with sclerosis and albuminuria. Her immediate condition was the sequel of an attack of influenza, with slight fever and disturbances of the stomach and intestines. She had not felt well again since the influenza. She complained of difficult breathing on waking, attacks of vertigo, and a pounding sensation in the head, ears and hands, which was especially troublesome on waking, but occurred also when she walked or climbed uphill. Her sleep was good. There was a tendency to constipation. The urine contained protein. Her blood pressure was 185mm Hg. We took our start from the sclerosis which was noticeable in the over-activity of the astral body. The physical and etheric bodies were unable to receive the full activity of the astral. In such a case, excess activity of the astral body remains, which the physical and etheric do not re-absorb. The normal and firm poise of the human organization is only possible when this re-absorption is complete. Otherwise, as in this case, the non-absorbed part will make itself felt in attacks of vertigo and subjective sensory illusions, pounding etc. Also the non-absorbed part takes hold of the digested substances, forcing certain processes upon them before they have penetrated into the normal metabolism. This became apparent in the tendency to constipation, in the excretion of albumen, also in the stomach and intestinal disorders. The blood pressure is raised in such a case because the excess activity of the astral body also heightens the activity of the ego, and this reveals itself in raised blood pressure.—We treated the case mainly with our remedy, “Scleron”; we supplemented this with very minute doses of belladonna, only as an aid to counteract immediately the attacks of vertigo. We gave elder-flower tea to help the digestion, regulated the action of the bowels by enemas and laxative tea, and ordered a salt free diet, because salts tend to aggravate sclerosis. A comparatively quick improvement was the result. The attacks of vertigo receded, likewise the pounding. The blood pressure went down to 112mm Hg. The patient's subjective feeling visibly improved. During the subsequent year the sclerosis made no further progress. At the end of a year the patient came to us again with the same symptoms in a lesser degree. A similar treatment brought about a further improvement; now, after a lapse of considerable time since the treatment it is evident that the sclerosis is producing no further degeneration of the organism. The external symptoms characteristic of sclerosis are on the decline, and the accompanying rapid aging of the patient is no longer there.

Eighth Case. Treatment of a Goitre.

[ 15 ] A woman patient, who came to us in the thirty-fourth year of her life. She is typical of an individual whose psychic state is strongly influenced by a certain heaviness and fragility of the physical body. Every word she utters seems to cost her an effort. Very characteristic is the concavity in the whole shape of her face; the root of the nose is as if it were held back within the organism. She tells us that she was delicate and sickly even as a schoolgirl. The only actual disease that she went through was a slight attack of measles. She was always pale and very tired and had a poor appetite. She was sent from one doctor to another, and the following were diagnosed in succession: Infection of the apex of the lung, gastritis, anaemia. In her own mind the patient felt that she was not so much physically ill, but rather psychologically.

[ 16 ] Having given this part of her history, we will now indicate the spiritual-scientific diagnosis, in order to examine everything further against the latter.

[ 17 ] The patient reveals a highly atonic condition of the astral body. The ego-organization is thus held back, as it were, from the physical and etheric bodies. The whole life of consciousness is permeated by a subtle, dull drowsiness. The physical body is exposed to the processes arising from the ingested substances. Therefore, these substances are transformed into parts of the human organization. The etheric body in its coherent vitality is too strongly muted by the ego and the astral body; hence the inner sensations, namely, the sense of well-being and the sense of the orthostasis of the body become far too vivid, and the activity of the external senses is too dull. All the bodily functions thus have to take a course whereby they come into disharmony with one another. Inevitably the feeling arises in the patient that she cannot hold the functions of her body together with her own ego. This appears to her as a powerlessness of the soul. Hence she says she is more psychologically than physically ill. If the powerlessness of the ego and astral body increases, disease conditions must arise in various parts of the body, as is also indicated by the different diagnoses. Powerlessness of the ego expresses itself in irregularities of glands, such as the thyroid and the suprarenal; also in disorders of the stomach and intestinal system. All this is to be expected in the patient and does in fact occur. Her goitre and the condition of her stomach and intestinal system correspond entirely with the spiritual-scientific diagnosis. Most characteristic is the following: owing to the powerlessness of the ego and the astral body the need for sleep is partly satisfied during waking life, the patient's sleep is therefore lighter than a normal person's. To her, this appears as a persistent insomnia. In connection with this, she has a sense of easily falling asleep and easily awakening. Also in this connection she thinks she has many dreams, they are not, however, real dreams but mixtures of dreams and waking impressions. Thus they do not remain in her memory and are not powerfully exciting, for her excitability is lowered. In the inner organs the powerlessness of the ego first expresses itself in the lungs. Infection of the apex of the lung is in reality always a manifestation of a weak ego organization. The metabolism not being fully taken care of by the ego leads to rheumatism. Subjectively these things come to expression in the patient's general fatigue. Menstruation began at the age of fourteen; the weak ego organization cannot supply a sufficient unfolding of its forces to repress and restrain the menstrual process once it has come into flow. The work of the ego in this act of restraint comes as a sensation into consciousness through those nerves that enter the spinal cord in the region of the sacrum. Nerves insufficiently permeated by the currents of the ego-organization and the astral body are painful. Thus the patient complains of lower back pain during menstruation. All this led us in the following way to treatment. We have discovered that Colchicum autumnale has a powerfully stimulating action on the astral body, notably on the part that corresponds to the organization of the neck and head. Hence, we apply Colchicum autumnale to all those diseases which have their most important symptom in goitre. Accordingly, we gave the patient five drops of our Colchicum preparation three times a day; the goitre swelling receded and the patient felt much relieved. When the astral body is thus strengthened, it mediates a better functioning of the ego-organism, so that remedies which can work upon the organs of digestion and reproduction keep their strength in the organism. As such a remedy we used wormwood enemas, mixing them with oil, since oil stimulates the digestive tract. With this remedy we attained a considerable improvement. We hold that this treatment can develop its particularly favourable influence about the thirty-fifth year of life, for at this age the ego-organization has a strong affinity to the rest of the organism and can be readily stimulated, even when weak. The patient was thirty-four years old when she came to us.

Ninth Case. Migrainous Conditions in the Menopause.

[ 18 ] This patient came to us at the age of fifty-five. She informed us that she had been weak and delicate as a child; during childhood she had measles, scarlet fever, chicken pox, whooping cough and mumps. Menstruation began at the age of fourteen to fifteen. The bleeding was unusually intense and painful from the outset. In the fortieth year she underwent an oopherohysterectomy because of a tumour in the lower abdomen. She also reported that she suffered since the age of thirty-five from a migrainous headache lasting three days, every three or four weeks, which in her forty-sixth year developed into a cerebral illness lasting three days with unconsciousness. The spiritual-scientific diagnosis of her current condition is as follows: General weakness of the ego organization, which expresses itself in that the activity of the etheric body is insufficiently immobilized by the ego organization. Hence the vegetative organic activity extends over the head and nerve-sense system to a far greater degree than is the case when the ego-organization is normal. This diagnosis is corroborated by certain symptoms. Firstly a frequent urgency of micturition. This is due to the fact that the normally developed astral body which regulates the secretion of the kidneys is unopposed by a normally restraining ego-organization of sufficient strength. A second symptom is the long time she took to fall asleep and her tiredness on awakening. The astral body has difficulty in leaving the physical and etheric, for the ego is not strong enough in drawing it away. And when she has awakened, the vital activity, working on after sleep, was perceived as a feeling of fatigue owing to the weakness of the ego. A third symptom is to be found in the scarcity of her dreams. The pictures which the ego-organization can impress upon the astral body are feeble and cannot express themselves as vivid dreams.

[ 19 ] These perceptions led to the following treatment: we had to pave the way for the ego-organization to the physical and etheric bodies. We did this by compresses with a two per cent Oxalis solution on the forehead in the evening, compresses with a seven per cent solution of Urtica dioica on the lower abdomen in the morning, and compresses with a twenty per cent solution of lime blossom on the feet at midday. The object was, in the first place, to tone down the vital activity during the night; this was brought about by the oxalic salt, which exercises within the organism the function of suppressing an excessive vital activity. In the morning we had to ensure that the ego-organization could find its way into the physical body. This was done by stimulating the circulation. The iron effect of the stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) was applied for this purpose. Finally, it was desirable to assist the penetration of the physical body by the ego-organization in the course of the day. This was done by the downward drawing action of the lime blossom compresses at midday. We have already referred to the headaches to which the patient had become subject, with their intensification at the forty-sixth year of life. For us there was connection between the headaches and the cessation of the menses after the operation and their intensification with unconsciousness as a compensatory symptom for the menopause. We first tried to effect an improvement by the use of antimony. This should have worked if we had been concerned with the general metabolism, regulated by the organization of the ego. There was, however, no improvement. This proved to us that we were dealing with the relatively independent part of the ego-organization which primarily regulates the organs of reproduction. For the treatment of this, we see a specific remedy of the root of Potentilla tormentilla at a very high dilution, and in fact this worked.

Whoever speaks of occultism today should realize that much of what they have to say will be taken, not simply as a compilation of doubtful hypotheses, but even as dreams and fantasies. Regarding any disagreement aroused by what I will say tonight among hearers who are involved with contemporary culture or science, let me assure them that I, for one, fully understand their objections. First, then, let me indicate what I really mean by occultism, which is the subject of today's lecture, and by the methods of investigation leading to the results of occultism, which may be summed up by the word initiation.

Simply put, initiation is the sum total of what we must accomplish in order to arrive at the results of occultism. When I speak of occultism, I do not mean all those things which are now designated under this name and are spread about here and there. I mean the precise results of a kind of spiritual science subjected to scientific thinking and to the logical requirements of the present. By occultism I mean everything that under this name, and from the standpoint of science as mentioned above, seeks to take its place in modern life through the study of things inaccessible to ordinary science and ordinary knowledge. What is often published these days as occultism is more than calculated to arouse the opposition of many of our contemporaries, who say: What is this occultism, coming forward with insights concerning super-sensible life and super-sensible facts! What is it compared with the results achieved by modern science, based upon such strict and conscientious research!

The insights which are thus advanced, those which I am talking about, are primarily those which lead us beyond sense-perception and beyond the things which can be recognized by ordinary understanding, which is connected, as it were, with the instrument of the brain. These insights lead us beyond things which can be experienced between birth and death into regions we enter when we pass through the portal of death. The results obtained through spiritual science, or let us say, through this form of occultism, speak of the development of the true spiritual core of the human being, and they show us that when one passes through the portal of death, one's soul-spiritual core passes over into a super-sensible, spiritual world. From the life led between birth and death in a physical body, one takes along certain forces and, by entering into relation with other purely super-sensible forces and powers during an intermediate period between death and a new birth, one's soul-spiritual being can connect itself with the forces given by physical heredity, with what comes from father and mother and from the ancestors in general—in short, with what unites itself with these purely physical substances and forces—so that the whole human being comes into existence.

This will show you that the results of such a spiritual form of research must speak of the development of a person's soul-spiritual core, a course of development that goes through repeated earthly lives. Consequently it speaks of reincarnation, of repeated lives on earth. It also explains that the inner capacities that we unfold within our soul during one life, and even the blows of destiny which we experience, are in a certain way the results of what we have prepared for ourselves during an earlier life on earth. It explains moreover that everything we experience during this earthly life, all the capacities we acquire, pass through the portal of death-we elaborate them in a super-sensible, purely spiritual world, and when these qualities have been elaborated to a sufficient degree in the spiritual world, we once more enter a new life on earth, as already described.

This perception in itself may strike some people as a rather daring assertion. To it must be added the things that explain, upon the basis of spiritual science, the super-sensible part of human nature which belongs with the physical being. These things will explain that, in addition to the physical body that we perceive through our external senses, there is also a part of the human being which is the bearer of a super-sensible essence. This part can be perceived with the aid of spiritual-scientific means, so that it can be recognized as a human being's soul-spiritual core, passing through repeated lives on earth and experiencing the destinies mentioned above.

The publications of this spiritual science even draw attention to earlier conditions of human life in remote epochs of earthly existence. From a spiritual-scientific standpoint, these publications also speak of cosmic conditions during a time when the earth did not as yet exist in its present planetary form, that is, they point to conditions which existed before human life on earth began. They look at the evolution of cosmic life itself, the transformation of our Earth and of other heavenly bodies. If we work with the methods of this spiritual science we must admit on the one hand, that if anything at all can be known concerning such things, these perceptions affect human life most deeply, because they are connected with our innermost nature and being. On the other hand we must point out that, particularly from the standpoint of so-called modern natural science, we encounter justified skepticism about the possibility of gaining any knowledge in these spheres.

The next question which may be raised in the face of the results of such investigation is the one which will form the subject of this evening's lecture. It is none other than the more than justified question: How do those who advance such statements arrive at their results? How do they set about coming to such conclusions? Needless to say, despite the conscientiousness and sureness of ordinary scientific method (and nobody admires these more sincerely than a serious spiritual scientific investigator), it does not allow us to penetrate into super-sensible spheres. But having raised this question, another immediately arises within the human soul, prompted by an indisputable fact: Since there is undoubtedly a deep longing to know such things in every human heart, how does it come about that precisely the most conscientious method of research seems to separate human beings from the world in which they long to look?

If we face this question without prejudice, it soon becomes obvious that the human being is only able to understand certain kinds of facts, when facing them in a particular way. In reality, I can only understand things of which I know the origin and course of development. I can only understand those things in creation in which I can, in a certain way, participate actively through my cognitive capacity. I can only grasp those things at the creation of which I can, in some way, be present. But if I turn my gaze upon the things that surround me in nature, upon the essence of all the kingdoms of nature, I must say to myself: Their form of existence, the way in which they appear finished to me, allows me to see them clearly through my senses and I can know them because I investigate their laws and combine them with my intellect—but when I wish to understand how they have arisen, I cannot penetrate them and my power of observation fails.

The beings and facts of the kingdoms of Nature confront humans as finished acts of creation and at first it appears that we cannot get a hold of things at the moment they are created. But if human beings look into their inner self and survey all that lives in their soul in the form of thoughts, representations, feelings, and impulses of the will, they face a more or less rich inner world, a world whose reality they experience far more vividly than the reality of external objects and the reality of that part of the self which belongs to the external world. Who can deny that the reality of our pains and sufferings, of our impulses and passions, of our thoughts and ideals-in short, of all that surges up and down within our soul from the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep, is greater than the reality of the physical and physiological processes within our organism? But even if we do our utmost to gain insight into our soul life-and we find that it is kindled by the external world, that this or that experience affects us, and fills us with joy or sorrow-even if we do our utmost to look into our soul life, we cannot even there take part in, nor penetrate into, the actual genesis of any inner soul process, we cannot be witness to the creative process within us. But bearing in mind that we can only grasp something by participating in its creative process, we can understand what we lose through the two modes of observation explained above.

It is enough to survey what is produced by our fantasy, what we create by means of something lying, so to speak, within our own power, what we form in accordance with our thoughts and ideals; it is enough to remember all that is now accessible to the human being—on the one hand, the sense of satisfaction that arises through an understanding of creative processes, an understanding gained through technical knowledge and by the way in which we combine thoughts dealing with the forces of nature and, on the other hand, the deep dissatisfaction which makes us feel as if we were standing before a gate through which we cannot pass, whenever we survey things around us and within us and realize that we know nothing whatever of their origin and of their living process. But might it not be possible, after all, to find some access enabling us to participate in these creative processes, to penetrate into what we feel to be life's creative processes, in which we ourselves are placed?

There is one sphere where we can know in a direct way that we participate—in a certain manner in a creative process, but at the same time we know that in ordinary consciousness, observation and cognition do not allow us to look into the process of creation!

What is meant here can be seen every day, if only we reflect a little over the strange phenomena which appear in the alternating states of sleeping and waking. For those who wish to penetrate more deeply into the essence of life, these phenomena are of the profoundest significance. They evoke what we may call a mystery of life. Though it may not strike our ordinary consciousness that something so infinitely significant is contained in these alternating conditions of sleeping and waking, this is only due to the fact that every habitual thing in life has lost the power of making a strong impression upon us. Just because we are accustomed to these alternating states of sleeping and waking within twenty-four hours, we no longer feel the deep significance, the greatness and power suggested by this everyday phenomenon.

If we wish to characterize the difference between sleeping and waking, it will at first seem trivial and obvious; for everyone knows that sleep occurs in such a way that all the emotions filling our soul from the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep, the feelings, sensations, impulses, passions, thoughts and ideals, disappear. This whole day world becomes submerged in darkness, in the night of unconsciousness. But everyone is also convinced that even sleep, during the transitory stage between falling asleep and waking up, the activities within our being continue; something occurs, but it is inaccessible to human consciousness.

What can be said, then, concerning the alternating conditions of sleeping and waking is undoubtedly and obviously true; but if we reflect on it, we realize that the reason why a barrier is put up before our knowledge does not lie so far away. If we observe this alternation of waking and sleeping, we must say that our whole daytime conscious life, our whole waking life, must be a kind of destructive process, dissolving deeper processes within our organism. I cannot speak in detail of the physical, chemical and physiological processes of fatigue, for this would lead us too far, and this is not the essential point just now, but what is evident to all is that fatigue is something like a wear and tear, almost a destructive process of deeper forces that are active in our organism. This shows us that, in reality, the peculiarity of our waking daytime life is that it does not participate in our constructive processes, in the creation of our own being, but that it shows symptoms of fatigue, and that, after all, it constantly consumes us, dissolves us. The waking life of day is in fact a process of dissolution and of destruction, and any unprejudiced observer will note that sleep is the very opposite: it is a creative process which restores, reorders and creates anew that which the waking process destroys and decays.

Yet it is only natural that we cannot know anything concerning this creative process within us that takes place during sleep. It concerns us directly, yet we cannot know anything about it, because immediately before this creative process arises, we lose our consciousness, so that we cannot penetrate knowingly into spheres within our being where creative processes take place. But this leads to the immediate conclusion that if only we were able to maintain our consciousness beyond the point where torpor sets in, we could take hold of the creative phenomena in nature and in the universe. When creative forces begin to work in human beings, their consciousness becomes dazed: they fall asleep, become unconscious and this shows us that human nature, as presently constituted, is such that when we wish to penetrate into a creative activity-moreover one that takes place within ourselves-our consciousness vanishes, so that we cannot witness the creative process. The activities within the human organism which are of a creative kind constitute a part of our being into which we cannot penetrate because the activities dull our consciousness and remain a strange world. There is no other path leading to a knowledge of things lying behind the sensory world than that of transcending our ordinary consciousness and penetrating into a creative process which takes place within us, or into some other similar process.

Where do we find something that can teach us how to transcend our ordinary consciousness and to penetrate into something which is estranged from us, without getting dazed, without falling into a kind of sleep? In the large field accessible to our ordinary consciousness there are two things which evidently lead us out of our ordinary consciousness without dazing us or putting us to sleep, as is the case every evening, when we go to bed. These two things in our ordinary consciousness that may serve as a kind of pattern for the way in which our consciousness can transcend its ordinary limits and penetrate into an unknown sphere, these two things must be sought in the moral field. Two moral experiences, permeating the whole life of the human being, supply a prototypical idea for the way in which we can go out of ourselves, without losing our consciousness.

These two things are first compassion, and second, conscience. If we study the way in which compassion and conscience are related to consciousness, we obtain, to begin with, an idea of how consciousness may go beyond its own limits. When I develop compassion, love or sympathy for another human soul, I experience within myself, according to my capacity, not that which touches me—for that would not be an experience of compassion and of love—but the joys, sorrows, pains and pleasures of the other soul. When I am full of compassion, I can lose myself in the soul of another person, and I actually live (as any unprejudiced observation will show) outside my ordinary consciousness, within the other soul.

Here I am confronted by a deep mystery of life. It is all the deeper because, if our feelings are of a moral nature, our consciousness does not vanish and we are not dazed when passing over into the consciousness of another soul. Indeed, how far I am able to maintain my own consciousness to a full extent, when experiencing the sorrows and joys of another soul, and not my own, is a standard of measure for my morality. It is even a moral defect for my consciousness to be dazed by the joys and sorrows of another soul; for then we have a situation similar to that of facing one's own creative activity taking place during sleep. Consciousness falls asleep, as it were, in the face of another person's sorrows and joys.

The second experience which pertains to the moral sphere and leads us out of our ordinary consciousness, is conscience. If we observe conscience in an unprejudiced way, we can say the following: In life we may love or hate, do or leave certain things undone, under the influence of our instincts and passions, or of sympathy and antipathy, or perhaps we may follow the dictates of education or of social relations—these appear to us from outside. But there is something which never speaks to us from outside, and this we call conscience.

Conscience comes to us from a world—we can feel and experience this—that speaks to us inwardly and can be heard by us inwardly. Conscience influences our ordinary perceptible world, for everything which we can perceive is open to correction when the super-sensible demands of conscience impel us to action. Conscience bears witness to the fact that, in the moral sphere, our soul can be told something which transcends our consciousness. And, again, we find that it is a moral defect if our soul falls into a kind of sleep when conscience begins to speak and does not listen to its voice but only listens to what speaks from the physical environment through sympathy or antipathy, so that these promptings govern the soul's impulses to action. If we can thus transcend our ordinary consciousness without feeling dazed, conscience is a phenomenon that speaks to the human soul in such a way that it need not take its impulses from any influence coming from the external world.

In regard to beings outside our own self, in regard to experiences transcending our knowledge and our consciousness, we have in the moral sphere the possibility to penetrate into them through compassion and love. Through conscience we listen, as it were, to truths which do not come from the world of the senses.

If it is possible in this way to penetrate into beings outside our own and to take into our souls truths of the kind uttered by conscience, then there is a prospect of penetrating into a world which is not the one given to us during our waking consciousness from the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep. It is possible, and this prospect opens out to us through methods we call the methods of initiation. In regard to thinking, feeling, and willing, these methods of initiation consist in other forms of soul-activity than those to which we are accustomed in our ordinary life for the acquisition of an external knowledge concerning the world.

Why do we acquire concepts and ideas in ordinary life? No one will deny that the reason modern people form concepts and ideas is to gain through these thoughts, and even through their feelings and sensations, certain knowledge concerning what surrounds them in the external world. Today, we designate as truth those concepts and ideas that coincide with something outside, with some phenomenon of the external world, so that these thoughts are, as it were, a reflected image of the external world. For everything that is connected with external life, with the external culture, this form of soul-activity is undoubtedly the right one. But if we wish to penetrate into super-sensible spheres of existence, this soul-activity must undergo a complete transformation. In other words (let me use the taboo word!), if we wish to penetrate into occult mysteries, entirely different soul-forces must be used. Our concepts, ideas, thought-pictures, indeed even our feelings and will-impulses, must become quite different from what they mean to us in the external world.

We should not begin by asking: What do these soul-activities mean in regard to this or that in the external world and what is their true value? We should simply take this content of our soul-life as a pedagogical means of self-training. We should let our thoughts and ideas, and even our feelings and sensations work in our soul in such a way as to shut it out from everything coming to us from the external world, even from the life experiences and memories we have collected. By a strong effort of the will, we should eliminate all impressions coming to us from the physical world, all intellectual thought patterns, and even all anxieties, worries and joys—indeed, anything which may have accumulated in our memory. We should empty our soul, so that the same condition sets in which ordinarily arises through fatigue when we fall asleep in the evening. Doing so, however, we should reach something entirely opposite to sleep, namely we should be able to maintain our full consciousness and direct it towards fruitful thoughts, particularly towards symbolic thoughts, as rich in meaning as possible. (The essential point is not to ask what value such thoughts have for the attainment of truth, but to bear in mind their pedagogical value, when the soul's forces are directed towards a thought image, or an impulse which is set in the center of soul-life through a strong effort of the will.)

This soul activity, purified of everything else, is turned towards this self-chosen picture and concentrates upon it more and more until the whole life of the soul, which remains awake through a strong concentration of the will, is centered upon this self-chosen content. We then start noticing that something begins to radiate within our soul life and these rays do not stream from the content we have chosen, but from the strong concentration of soul forces we have applied to it. We are now able to experience something which we generally do not experience, and we obtain the immediate feeling, the immediate experience: “Now I am experiencing something which is just as real, important and essential for life as the things which I see with my eyes and hear with my ears; it is just as real, yet I could never have experienced it!” In short, only now do we begin to know what super-sensible experience really is; only now do we realize that we live within a soul-spiritual core; only now do we begin to understand that it is possible to live within an inner soul being which is quite independent of the bodily being. And this transforms our whole consciousness.

I must point out expressly that the process leading to this inner activity greatly resembles, while also being the very opposite, the trivial process which takes place when our attention is directed towards a shining object, producing a kind of hypnosis. This soul condition, which differs from the normal one, arises through the sharp concentration upon an object, so that other soul activities are kept in the background. The concentration upon an inner, freely chosen content has a certain resemblance with this soul activity, for it is also a kind of concentration; yet it is at the same time the very opposite; for the concentration upon a shining object blots out consciousness, it puts us into a quasi-hypnotic state, whereas when an inner content, and it is strictly an inner thought-content, is placed at the center of our soul life by a strong effort of our will, our consciousness remains intact.

Spiritual science has a technical name for this method of training the soul: meditation. This is true meditation. And I wish to emphasize that this kind of meditation is in practice far more difficult then one would think, after hearing it described in such a simple way. It does not suffice to try it a few times. Over and over again we should endeavour to practice such concentration, such meditation, by forming thought-images and pictures, ideas taken from the moral and intellectual sphere—and particularly symbolic representations. This should be done with perseverance, until the decisive moment arises. This simply consists in the inner conviction: “I have within my being a soul-spiritual core, and this lives in a super-sensible reality, but in its super-sensible reality it cannot be perceived through the ordinary sense-organs, nor grasped through the intellect, bound up with the brain.”

From what I have described above, you will be able to deduce one thing—we always remain within our own being. We turn away from the external world by concentrating upon our inner self. The first thing we thus experience is, and only can be, an inner experience, an experience of our inner being, and this leads us practically to a definite point. One who concentrates in this way, or meditates, soon perceives—really does perceive—that his or her field of vision is filled with realities; we may call them, if you like, visions. They appear in the form of pictures, which cannot be compared to anything else, though there may be some external resemblance with what we see in the physical world. Particularly in regard to the way in which they arise and in regard to the effect which they produce, however, these pictures constitute an altogether new experience, and are in no way put together from earlier experiences. This completely new element must be designated as vision, for there is no other apt word to describe it in our ordinary speech. One might say that this new experience exactly resembles the pictures of a dream; yet compared with ordinary dreams, these visions have a far stronger intensity, and possess, so to speak, an obtrusive, almost importunate reality.

At this point, those who practice the methods giving insight into the super-sensible world encounter an obstacle, which might be seen as a danger. They incur the danger of taking this visionary world from the outset as something real, as facing them in the same way as the ordinary physical world outside, so that when they perceive this visionary world, they say, “This world is real,” in the same way as they would in connection with the sensory world. This danger becomes all the more threatening if all the precautions connected with an occult training, such as the one described above, are not observed. These preventive measures are dealt with in detail in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and a person who follows them never for a moment loses the feeling that the world of visions is the self, and that we ourselves produce this world.

It is of the utmost importance that we should never allow our consciousness to be dulled to the extent of having the impression that an external world lies before us in this visionary world. It exactly resembles a world lying outside our own being: it stretches out before us in the manner of a spatial world; it reveals processes governed by time, just like the processes of the external physical world; it calls up altogether the delusion that we are facing a reality, like a dream enhanced to the utmost degree of lifelines. People who neglect such precautions and who do not recognize that they themselves have created this visionary world naturally fall prey to dreams and empty fancies. A truly clairvoyant person—allow me to use this word—differs in this point from the fantastic and visionary dreamer who takes such visions for objective realities. Those who have advanced to real clairvoyance are aware at every moment, know and must know, through an intensive self-training, that although they see before them an extensive spatial world, this is merely a world of their own creation. Such things exercise a very suggestive influence, but never for a moment should we lose the consciousness of the fact that they are nothing but our own creation. This consciousness in turn should become the object of meditation and concentration. We should make an effort of the will to concentrate again and again, intensively and for a long time, upon the fact that this new world we have, as it were, conquered is our own work, our own product. And then something strange arises within our consciousness—(this can, of course, only be described as a practical experience). We recognize that in performing this activity we have done quite consciously something which we also do in a normal state of consciousness.

I have already told you that in our normal state of consciousness we really produce a destructive process within us. Ordinarily we do not know this, or at least, we do not pay any attention to it. When we conjure up before us such a visionary world, while maintaining our full consciousness, and at the same time concentrate upon the thought characterized above, we also become fully aware of the fact that the “imaginative knowledge” (this is the technical expression used for it) thus reached also produces a destructive process. We observe that we always come to the point where the imaginative world begins to consume us, and if we were to relinquish the full consciousness that can be maintained only through a strong effort of will, if we were not to realize fully that in this visionary world we encounter everywhere our own being, our nervous system would suffer and would become ill. We should never come to the point of overstepping the limit where the real destructive processes would begin. Through the fact that we do not allow things to come as far as the destructive process, but keep it at bay through the intense consciousness that we ourselves are the creators of this imaginative world, through this fact we are able to participate in a creative process. For when we fulfill within ourselves certain creative activities which cannot be perceived through our normal consciousness, we really enter a creative world, and we learn to follow consciously a process resembling that which takes place during sleep. This shows us that in this way we can witness a creative process, understand a process of growth and development within ourselves.

This is, however, connected with something else, though I can only give a brief description of these stages of initiation. Little by little, the whole process forces us to renounce something the ordinary clairvoyant does not like to renounce. The ordinary clairvoyant is so glad to live in this world of visions, he or she takes such indulgent pleasure in these experiences of a higher world, and they are so suggestive that he or she easily takes them for reality. This can lead to a nervous breakdown. But if through, the above effort of will we remain fully conscious that “all this is produced by our own self,” if our consciousness never falls asleep, something arises that is a source of regret to many—namely, the power lying at the foundation of that effort of our will falls destructively upon this whole imaginative world, disposes of it and many things which the ordinary clairvoyant holds very precious are thus blotted out. In other words, the following happens. Although in imaginative consciousness we have an element really setting forth the forces constituting a creative process (for we do not let it go beyond the limit where the destructive process would set in)—and we really transcend our ordinary consciousness, as we normally do when we feel compassion or love—the decision, or the effort of will by which we bring destruction (but also structure and order) into our visionary world leads to the development of an activity that does not exist anywhere in the external physical world, and that very soon reveals itself as the creative activity within our own being, lying beyond the reach of our ordinary consciousness. It is the activity which may be seen in our soul-spiritual being when it works upon our organism by drawing regenerating forces out of its spiritual environment; it is the soul-spiritual core which lives in the spiritual cosmos.

In the next stage, which is technically designated as inspiration, we learn to recognize the soul-spiritual core of our being, and how it lives within the creative forces of the cosmos. Whereas imagination, the first stage of initiation, only led us into our inner being by conjuring up a merely visionary world, the process of inspiration leads us to a higher stage. A flash of light breaks in upon our whole visionary world, something that really seems to come out of the spiritual cosmos, as does conscience, and we observe that it speaks to us in the same way in which conscience speaks to us in our ordinary consciousness. Conscience may be compared to the way in which inspiration speaks to the imaginative consciousness; but then imagination passes over to the stage of inspiration, and we enter a real, super-sensible world.

Through our own development, we have now reached the point where we can glance behind the veil of physical phenomena, so that now we are able to understand the wonderful mystery of human development and also of human death. When we see a human being entering life through birth, when we perceive how the child's undeveloped physiognomy gradually acquires characteristic traits, and its helpless movements gradually acquire strength and sureness, when we observe the development of what lives in the child's soul, we can no longer say: Everything that comes out of the child's soul, that forms its body and its physiognomy, and even the delicate convolutions of the brain immediately after birth, is the result of heredity! No, we are now able to look back upon the child's soul-spiritual core that comes from an entirely different world, and we can see this soul-spiritual part of the child's being unites itself with what comes from father and mother. Now we no longer speak merely of hereditary forces, but of forces from the spiritual world that unite themselves with what is transmitted by father and mother and by ancestors in general. We obtain a real conception of something which was formerly a mere belief, namely, that the human soul-spiritual being comes from the spiritual world and forms the physical-bodily part.

We can then proceed still further. When we study life through the knowledge given by initiation, we see that the human being's soul-spiritual core directs the experiences of life more and more towards its inner center, abstracting them from the external world. We understand and we can see how the soul-spiritual part gradually retreats from the external world. We can see the face getting old and wrinkled, and we obtain the immediate impression: Whereas our physical body begins to fade, after we have reached the climax of life, and even our brain decays, so that the soul can no longer express its own content, and even the soul itself seems to decay, we see on the other hand that the part that can no longer express itself outwardly gradually withdraws to the person's inner being, and concentrates its forces, so that everything which we have experienced, suffered and achieved is gathered within the soul, and is at its strongest, its most powerful, when the body releases our soul-spiritual part. If we follow this process, we find that this strongest force within us becomes united with forces of the super-sensible world, forming the prototype of a new incarnation, of a new body for a new life on earth.

If we compare what stands at the beginning of life—the gradual plastic development of the body—if we compare it with what stands at the end of life—the inner concentration of life's experiences within the soul, the emancipation of the soul's forces from the body and the crossing of the threshold of death—if we observe these two things supersensibly, we find that it is like the beginning and the end, say, of a plant's development, where the final process already contains the seed, the beginning of the new plant. But though we see beginning and end thus linked up, super-sensible knowledge gained through initiation shows us that what the soul has experienced during life is interwoven with the soul-spiritual core and that when the human being returns, after an intermediate period between death and a new birth, a new body is built. But this soul-spiritual core of the being now forms a new body and a new earthly existence in such a way as to produce the effect of causes that had arisen during a preceding life.

The methods gained through initiation, whose prototypes were compassion and conscience, i.e., experiences of our ordinary consciousness, thus give us an immediate knowledge of processes of the super-sensible world connected with the human being. Initiation therefore becomes the path leading us up into the super-sensible worlds.

If you delve deeper into what I have described to you just now, in outline form, and if you study it in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, you will find, however, that this kind of initiation has its own characteristics. For its whole development and the way in which it sets forth the events, it follows the requirements of modern human education—the modern requirements of logic, sound common sense and science. Consequently these processes of initiation can be recognized more and more as the description of a path along which every human being may attain knowledge of the super-sensible world. In entirely free processes, produced only by the awakening of the soul and the inner forces of the soul, the human being can ascend into the super-sensible world and penetrate into processes which reveal the path taken by the soul-spiritual being. Such ideas do not only belong to a world that does not concern us but belong to a world out of which we constantly draw strength and confidence for our ordinary life. The fact that initiation reckons with modern logic and modern scientific requirements is of course a new achievement, one might say, of the process of initiation. People will gradually come to the point of acquiring knowledge in this manner, by following the example of scientific thought, and this will contain truths that penetrate and satisfy religious feeling through knowledge. But this constitutes a revolutionary change, and this change will consist in the process of initiation penetrating visibly and in an evident manner into the civilization of the present and of the future. It is a turning point in the development of humanity which may be designated in regard to super-sensible things as the change from faith to knowledge.

But faith (and it will be easier to understand this turning point if we bear this in mind), in the form in which it has arisen and in the light of initiation, is not something that has been thought out intellectually, nor is it a newer form of illumination based upon something unreal; for every kind of faith leads back to results originally gained by initiated persons, to results of initiation. But there is a certain difference between what will more and more become human initiation generally and initiation of past times.

In past times it was a strict rule—and this is still the case today for many initiations which still exist in the world—it was a strict rule that anyone who went in search of the path leading to initiation had to have a kind of guide, who was called in certain circles the spiritual guide, the guru. What is the task of a guru? We have seen that in the course of development described above, we encounter certain dangers, dangers against which we must be warned. In the initiations of the past, which have been handed down traditionally, the guru's chief task was to warn against dangers. A guru may do this even today, if he or she is simply a person whom we consider as a kind of teacher as in ordinary science—a person whom we can trust. But it can easily happen that the new guru wants to be what the old guru had to be, even though the guru today cannot be allowed to have that relationship with the pupil, and this will be increasingly the case the more initiation adapts itself to the progressive course of human development. Initiation really began everywhere in the manner described above. Rules were given, and each person had a personal guide and was told: Now you must concentrate upon this thing, and now upon that; now you must do this exercise, and now that. Under strict guidance, a condition was produced in which the world of imagination appeared. The modern person on the other hand—for that is the very nature of the modern human being—must pass over from imagination to inspiration through a strong effort of his or her own will, where in olden times this task was taken over by the guru who led the pupil from the stage of imagination to that of inspiration by means of certain influences to which the pupil was more easily amenable after having been led up to this stage of initiation. What I have described to you, as something lying concealed in every human being, became an impulse which the guru transmitted to the pupil. This brought the pupil's imaginative, visionary life into order. But, in the process, the guru would gain complete control over the pupil who would become, as it were, an instrument in the teacher's hands. Therefore in all initiations of the past, and they are really the source of every religious faith, there was therefore a strict requirement that the guru, the initiator, should be above the possibility of exercising an immoral or unjust influence over the pupil. In his or her whole inner attitude the guru had to be above every kind of deceit, and success depended upon the guru's having attained to this stage of development. The guru had to use influence only to the extent of transmitting to the pupil the truth-images of the higher world that he or she had gained, thus rendering the pupil's path more easy.

I think that if you wish to understand in an unprejudiced way the development of human consciousness, you will not need to accumulate many proofs showing that in regard to super-sensible knowledge as in other things humanity has become more and more independent of personal influences. This is simply a fact of the progress of the human evolution. The gurus who collect their pupils around them, as the founders of religions and sects were wont to do, will gradually disappear from the process of human development, and they will be replaced by men and women of trust, persons in whom the seeker for initiation can have trust and confidence—the same confidence which one has for other teachers. But such a teacher must, so to speak, be one of our own choosing and not a guru assigned to us. We no longer can overcome the perils which beset humanity by founding sects after the manner of ancient adepts. Indeed, in regard to super-sensible development, it is good for people not to be too easily inclined to believe but, on the contrary, be hard to convince. It is good if they ask themselves, not only once or twice, but many times, in whom they put their trust, and it is good if they are very skeptical and full of distrust, when any prophet, founder of a sect, or adept, is forced upon them as a great teacher. In the field of which I am speaking, it will always constitute a danger for spiritual streams seeking to bring occultism into the world to base themselves chiefly upon great teachers whose authority is enforced from outside, instead of being founded upon the natural confidence, the inner trust, that rises up in the pupils when they meet the teacher. In a certain connection, we have seen a classic example of this, and it is necessary to mention it. During the last decades, a personality has arisen who revealed to humankind great and significant truths, truths that are not yet recognized by ordinary science but are intrinsic truths, penetrating deeply into super-sensible mysteries. Things of this kind are contained in the books of H. P. Blavatsky, who has attained fame in certain circles. Even to those familiar with such things, her books contain truths of extraordinary significance, which, more than anything else, can lead us into the secrets of life. Unfortunately, this occult movement was connected with something which did it great harm. I do not mean to say that in itself it was an error, nevertheless it caused great harm that H. P. Blavatsky referred to her teachers, who were unknown to the world, to her gurus. Those who understand H. P. Blavatsky's capacities know that these capacities would never have enabled her to reach such truths independently. With her own capacities, she could never have reached them. These truths need no recommendation insofar as they are true, for they can be tested, so that it did not harm H. P. Blavatsky if she felt obliged to refer to traditions and exercises derived from gurus—she could never have attained them on her own. But it harmed the movement she called into life that such things were accepted upon the foundation of external authority, and not upon the inner truth of occultism. No matter how much good will might be involved, the fact is that the time is over—the necessities of the times show us, no matter whether this is justified or unjustified—that the possibility of taking in things simply upon the authority of gurus is past, more than past! These things must now be recognized through sound common sense. Truths which can be gained along the paths described, for instance, in my Theosophy, are therefore the result of the kind of spiritual investigation of which I have spoken today, but at the same time, these results can be tested and compared with the facts of life itself, and need not be accepted upon any authority.

Initiation can only be recognized and justified today if we take into consideration that it must adapt itself to the modern process of culture—and that it must follow paths and use means which are accessible to every human being.

Of course, for some time yet people having this or that degree of culture, or standing upon this or that stage of scientific training, may need the advice of an occult teacher, so that initiation becomes easier for them through the experience of one who has attained it and who has already taken in the inspirations from a higher world; for only such a teacher can give the right advice in detail. But the relation between pupil and teacher can only be of the kind that otherwise exists in the cultural world between one who wishes to learn something and one who can teach it. Any mysteriousness connected with adept teaching, any form of facing people with the demand—believe in this or that new prophet or founder of religion—all this will be rejected by the modern spirit of civilization, by the modern scientific spirit, and the very fact that it contradicts the modern spirit is a recommendation against it. No matter what people say in regard to teachers who may appear, the only thing which will in future give individuals the right to be teachers will be others' confidence in their achievements, in the way in which they appear and in their whole personality. It must be this confidence that leads a pupil to the teacher from whom advice is asked.

If this is not observed in the occult sphere, where initiation is sought, a danger will arise that is always connected with the delicate and intricate nature of such things: the danger that in this field charlatans will be found beside to conscientious initiates who conscientiously pursue their research into the super-sensible worlds and transmit the results thus obtained. Charlatanry easily intrudes itself, and may be found side by side with the conscientious results of occultism or initiation imparted in the spirit of truth. Credulity and sensational curiosity in regard to communications coming from the super-sensible world or initiation are just as great today as doubt, for there are just as many people ready to accept things upon this or that authority as there are people who reject everything gained even by the strictest methods of super-sensible research. For this reason, a path of investigation, such as the one of initiation described today, must now be shown in addition to the propagation of occult facts. This path of initiation is one that can be followed by every human being; the results obtained along it are accessible to sound common sense as well as any other scientific result; indeed, in the case of scientific truths, one is not always in the position to test them personally, as in the case of clinical facts or other results gained in laboratories. We know that anyone may investigate them if he or she understands the required method; yet it is not possible to test everything, so that we simply accept certain facts that convince us, those our sound common sense recognizes as true.

The same thing can be said of the results of initiation. Not every person will always be in the position to test them, but those who investigate will communicate their results to the world in an ever growing measure, and sound common sense will accept them, in the same way in which it accepts the results of other scientific investigations. There is, of course, a difference, namely that the results of initiation contain truths which every human being needs, in order to gain strength and sureness in the sorrows and joys of life, strength and sureness in work and in one's sphere of activity; so that humans may take hold of the central point of their being that leads them unswervingly along the path of their ideals. The results of spiritual investigation can also give us strength when life becomes crushing, and comfort is needed in sickness and in death, by looking up to the facts of the spiritual super-sensible world to which we belong, and from which we gain the true forces which keep us upright. Then into the human soul will penetrate those results of initiation and occultism that may be recapitulated in words expressing what has already been said concerning initiation:

Es sprechen zu den Menschensinnen
die Dinge in den Raumesweiten,
Sie wandeln sich im Zeitenlaufe.
Erkennend dringt die Menschenseele,
von Raumesweiten unbegrenzt
und ungestoert durch Zeitenlauf,
ins Reich der Ewigkeiten.

Things in the world's spaces
Speak to human senses,
Changing in the course of time.
By cognizing, the human soul
Unbounded by the distances of space
And undisturbed by the course of time
Penetrates into the kingdom of eternities.

A number of questions have been handed in, which can lead in a quite interesting way to what we are going to discuss today. Someone has asked: “What has man's cultural development arisen from?” I am going to consider this in connection with this second question: “Why did primitive man have such a strong belief in the spirit?”

It is certainly interesting to ask how men of former times have lived, and about this, as you know, even looking superficially at the matter, there are two opinions. One opinion is that originally man was at a high level of perfection from which he has fallen to his present imperfect state. We need not have any particular objection to this nor concern ourselves about the various ways the different peoples have interpreted this perfection—some talking of Paradise, others of other things. But until a short time ago the opinion held good that man was originally perfect, degenerating to his present state of imperfection gradually. The other view you have probably come to think of as the only true one, namely that man was originally imperfect, like some kind of higher animal, and evolved gradually to greater perfection. You know how people try to draw upon the primitive condition prevailing among savage peoples—or so-called savage peoples'—in order to get some idea of what man could have been when he still resembled an animal. It is said: We in Europe and the people of America are highly civilized, whereas in Africa, Australia, and so on, there live still uncivilized races at their original stage, or at least at a stage very near the original. From these it is possible to make a study of what people were to begin with.

But, curiously, in this way people are making far too simple a picture of man's evolution. To begin with, it is not at all true that, for example, all civilized peoples imagined that man as a physical being was originally perfect. The Indians are certainly not of the opinion held by modern materialists, but, even so, their conception is that the physical man who used to go about on earth in primitive times looked like an animal. When the Indians, the wise men of India, speak of man in his original earthly state, they talk of the ape-like Hanuman. So you see it is not at all true that people with a spiritual world-conception always imagine that originally men were in some way as people today imagine them to have been, that is, of a paradisian nature, for indeed it is not so. We have, rather, to be clear that man is a being who bears within him body, soul, and spirit, each member going through its own particular evolution. Naturally, when people do not speak of spirit, they cannot speak of the evolution of spirit. But once we admit that man consists of body, soul, and spirit, we can go on to ask in what way the body develops, in what way the soul and in what way the spirit evolve. If we are to speak of man's body then we shall say: Man's body has gradually been perfected from lower stages. We must also say that the evidence we have provides us with actual proof of this. As I have already pointed out, in the strata of the earth we find the original man exhibiting a very animal-like body—not indeed like any animal we have today, but animal-like, and this must have developed gradually to its present state of perfection. There is no question, therefore, of spiritual science as pursued here at the Goetheanum coming to loggerheads with natural science, for the truths of natural science are accepted by it.

On the other hand, we must come once more to recognize that in those times—which may be said to be only about three or four thousand years ago—views we re current from which today we not only can learn a great deal but which we are obliged to admire. When today we have a certain amount of relevant knowledge and study with real understanding the documents that have appeared in India, Asia, Egypt, or even in Greece, we find the people in those times far in advance of us. What they knew, however, was acquired in a quite different way from how we acquire knowledge today.

Today there are many things we know very little about. For example, from what I have shown you in connection with nutrition, you will have seen how necessary it is for spiritual science to come to our aid in the simplest nutritional matters. Physical science is unable to do so. But we have only to read what physicians of old had to say, and rightly understand it, to become aware that in reality people up to the time of Hippocrates in Greece knew far more than is known by our modern materialistic physicians. We grow to respect, deeply respect, the knowledge once possessed. The only thing is that knowledge was not imparted in the same form as it is today. Today we clothe our knowledge in concepts. This was not so in the case of ancient peoples; they clothed their knowledge in poetical imaginations, so that anything of it remaining to us is now just taken figuratively—as poetry. It was not poetry to those men of old, however; it was their way of expressing what they knew. Thus we find that when we are able to test and thoroughly to study the documents still existing, there can no longer be any question of men originally having been undeveloped spiritually. In spirit they are infinitely wiser than we are!

But there is another thing that has to be remembered. When men of primeval times went about he acquired great wisdom spiritually. His face was more or less what we should certainly call animal-like, whereas today in man's face his spirit finds expression, his spirit is as it were incorporated in the physical substance of his face. This, is a necessity if man is to be free, if he is to be a free being. These clever men of yore, the clever men of primeval times, were very wise but they possessed wisdom in the way the animal today possesses instinct. They lived in a dazed condition, as if in a cloud. They wrote without guiding their own hand; they spoke with the feeling that it was not they who were speaking but the spirit speaking through them. In those primeval times, therefore, there was no question of man being free.

This is something in the history of culture which constitutes a real step forward for the human race—this consciousness man has of his freedom. With it he no longer feels the spirit driving him as instinct drives the animal; he feels the spirit actually within him, and this distinguishes him from the man of former times.

When we consider from this point of view the savages of today, it must strike us that the men of primeval times—called in our question here primitive men—were not like the modern savages, but that these have descended from the primeval men. You will get a better idea of this if I tell you the following.

In certain districts there are people who harbour the notion that when they bury in the earth some little thing belonging to a sick person—for example, a corner of his shirt—that this can have the magical effect of healing him. I have even personally known such people. I knew one who, at the time the Emperor Frederick was ill, wrote to the Empress asking for a piece of shirt belonging to her husband. It would be buried in the cemetery and the Emperor Frederick would then be cured! You can imagine how this request was received. But the man had simply done what he thought would lead to the Emperor's recovery. He himself told me about it, adding that it would have been much less foolish to have let him have the piece of shirt than to have sent for the English doctor Mackenzie, and so on. That had been absurd—they should have sent him the piece of shirt.

When this kind of thing comes to the notice of a materialistic thinker, he says: This is a superstition that has arisen somewhere. At one time or other, a man or several men got the notion that burying part of a sick man's shirt and saying a little prayer over it would cure the man.

But nothing has ever arisen in this way. No superstition arises by being thought out; it comes about in quite a different way. There was once a time when people had great reverence for their dead and said to themselves: So long as a man is going about on earth he is a sinful being; besides doing good things, he does many that are bad. But—so they thought—the dead man goes on living in his soul and spirit and in death makes up for all deficiencies. Thus when they thought of the dead they thought of what was good, and by thinking of the dead they tried to make themselves better.

Now it is characteristic of human beings to forget easily. Just think how quickly the dead, those who have left us, are forgotten today. At that time, there were those who wanted to give their fellowman various signs to make them think of the dead, and thus to benefit their own health. Let us say someone in some village had the idea that if a man was ill, the other villagers should look after him. It was not the custom in villages to collect money for the sick, there were no poor-boxes, that kind of thing is a modern invention. At that time the villagers all had to help one another out of kindness; everyone had to think of those who were ill. The leading man in the village said: Because people are egoists they have no thought of the sick if they are not spurred on to get out of themselves and have thoughts, for instance, of the dead. So he told them they should take, perhaps, a corner of the sick man's shirt by which to remember him, and this was to be buried in the earth; through this they would remember the sick man. By thinking of the dead, they would remember to take care of someone. This outward deed was contrived simply to help man's memory. Later, people forgot the reason for all this and it was put down to magic, superstition. This is o in the case of a great deal that lives on as superstition; it has arisen from something perfectly reasonable. What is perfect never arises from what is imperfect. The assertion that something perfect can come from what is not so appears to anyone with insight as if it were said: You are to make a table, but you must make it as clumsy and unfinished as you can to begin with, so that it may in time become a perfect table. But it is not like that; we never get a well-made table from one that is ill-made. The table begins by being a good one and becomes battered in course of time. It is like that, too, outside in nature, anywhere in the world. You must first have things in a perfect state, out of which comes the imperfect. It is the same in the case of the human being whose spirit to begin with, though still lacking freedom, was in a certain state of perfection, but whose body, it is true, was imperfect. On the other hand the perfection of the body lay in its being soft and capable of being so moulded by the spirit that cultural progress could ensue.

So you see we are not justified in thinking that human beings were originally like the savages of today. Savages have developed into what they now are—with their superstitions, their magical practices, and their unclean appearance—from states originally more perfect. The only advantage we have over the savages is that, starting from the same conditions, we have not degenerated as they have. I might therefore say: The evolution of man has taken two different paths. It is not true that the savages of today represent the original condition of mankind. The men who, to begin with, looked more animal-like were highly civilised.

Now when you ask: But are these original, animal-like men the descendants of apes or of other animals? it is a quite natural question. You look at the apes as they are today and say: From these apes, men are descended. That is all very well but when human beings had this animal form, there were no such animals as our present apes! From apes as they are today, therefore, men have not descended. On the contrary, just as our present savages have fallen from the level of the human beings of primeval times, so the apes are beings who have fallen still lower. On going back further in the evolution of the earth we find human beings formed in the way I described here a short while ago, from a soft element and not from any animals as we have them. Human beings have never arisen from the kind of apes we now have. On the other hand, it might easily be possible that if conditions prevailing on earth today, conditions in which everything is based on authority and power—and wisdom counts for nothing—it might indeed happen that the men who thus want to found everything on power gradually take on animal-like bodies again, and that two great races may arise. One race would consist of those who stand for peace, for the spirit and for wisdom, whereas the other would be made up of those who re-assume animal forms. It might indeed be said that those who care nothing today for the progress of mankind may be running the risk of degenerating into apes.

You see, all manner of strange things are experienced today. What newspapers say is, of course, largely untrue, but sometimes in a quite remarkable way it shows the trend of man's thinking. During our recent travels in Holland, we bought an illustrated paper. On the last page of this paper there was a curious picture—a small child, quite a baby and its nurse, looking after it, an ape, an orang-utan. It was holding the child quite properly, and it was said to be installed somewhere in America as children's nurse.

It is possible that this may not be actual fact—as yet, but it shows what many people are hoping for: apes installed as nursemaids. And if apes are employed in this capacity, what an outlook for man! Once it has been discovered that apes can be employed to look after children, that in certain circumstances an ape can be trained to look after the physical needs of children—then people will develop this strange desire and the social question will be on a new level. For you will soon see what far-reaching proposals will be made for teaching apes in this way; they will be sent to work in the factories. Apes will be found to be cheaper than men, hence this will be looked upon as the solution of the social problem. If people really succeed in making apes look after children, we shall be inundated by pamphlets on how to solve the social question by training apes.

It is indeed conceivable that this might happen. Think—other animals besides apes can be trained to do many things; dogs, for instance, are very teachable. But the question is whether this will be for the advance or decline of civilization. Civilization will most definitely decline; it will deteriorate. The children brought up by ape-nurses will quite certainly become apelike. Then indeed we shall have the perfect changing into the imperfect. Thus we must be clear that it is possible for certain human beings to become of an ape-like nature in the future, but that the human race in the past was never such that men developed from the ape-like. For when man still had an animal-form (quite different indeed from that of the ape) the present ape was not yet in existence. They themselves have deteriorated; they have fallen from a higher stage.

When we turn to those primitive peoples who may be said to have been rich in spirit but animal-like in body, we find they were still undeveloped as far as understanding, intelligence, goes. Those men of ancient times were not capable of thinking. Hence, when anyone today who prides himself particularly on his thinking comes across ancient documents, he looks for them to be based on thought and looks in vain. He therefore says: This is all very beautiful but simply poetry. But indeed we cannot judge everything by our own standards alone, for then we go astray. Those men of yore had above all great powers of imagination, imagination that worked like instinct. When today we use our imagination we often pull ourselves up, saying: Imagination has no place in what is real. This is quite right for us today, but the men of primeval times, primitive men, would never have been able to carry on without imagination.

It will seem strange to you how this lively imagination possessed by primitive men could have been applied to anything real. However, here too we have wrong conceptions. In your school history books you will have read about the tremendous importance for man's evolution attached to the invention of a paper made from rag. The paper we use for writing—which is made of rag—has been in existence for only a few centuries. Before that, people had to write on parchment which has a different origin. Only at the end of the Middle Ages did men discover the possibility of making paper from fibre coming from plants—worn threadbare after having first been used for clothes. Human beings were late in acquiring intellect which was needed for making this paper. But the same thing—except that it is not white as we want it for our black ink—was discovered long before. The same stuff that is used now for our paper was discovered not just two or three thousand years ago but very many thousands of years before our day. By whom then? Not by human beings at all, but by wasps! Look at any wasps' nest you find hanging on a tree. Look at the material it consists of—paper! Not, however, white paper, not the kind you write on, for the wasps have not learned to write, otherwise they would have made white paper, but such paper as you might use for a parcel. We have indeed a drab-coloured paper for parcels which is just what the wasps use for making nests. The wasps found out how to make paper thousands of years ago, long before human beings arrived at it by means of their intellect. The difference is that instinct works in animals whereas in the man of primeval times it was imagination; they would have been incapable of making anything had not imagination enabled them to do so, for they lacked intelligence. We must therefore conclude that in outward appearance these primeval men were more like animals than are the men of today, but to a certain extent they were possessed by the spirit, the spirit was working in them. It was not they who possessed it through their own powers, they were possessed by it and their souls had great powers of imagination. With imagination they made their tools; imagination helped them in all they did, enabled them to make everything they needed.

We are terribly proud of all our inventions, but we should consider whether we really have cause to be so; for much of what constitutes the greatness of our culture has actually arisen from quite simple ideas. For example: when you read about the Trojan War—do you realize when the Trojan War took place? About 1200 years before the founding of Christianity. Now when we hear about wars like this which didn't take place in Greece, but far away in Asia, it did not happen in those days that the result was known in Greece the next day by telegram S Naturally at that time this did not happen for the Greeks had no electric telegraph. What then did they do? Look, (drawing) the war was over here, this was sea, here was an island, there a mountain, and there again sea, over here an island, a mountain and then sea, and so on till you came to Greece. It was agreed that when the war was over, three fires should be kindled on the mountain. Whoever was posted on the nearest mountain was first to give the signal by running up and lighting the three fires. On seeing the three fires, the one on the next mountain lit three fires in his turn, and in this way the signal arrived in quite a short time at Greece. This was their method of sending a telegram. The process was a quick one and before the day of the telegram, it had to suffice.

How is it then today? When you telephone, not telegraph, but telephone—I will show you in the simplest way what happens.¹ We have a kind of magnet which, it is true, is produced by electricity; and at this place (drawing) we have something called an armature. When the current is off, this falls in place; when the current is switched on, the plate is released and swings to and fro. It is connected by a wire with the next one which oscillates with it and transmits what is generated by the plate in just the same way as in those olden times the three fires conveyed messages to men. It is rather more complicated but still the same idea, though electricity has been used in applying it.

When we have actual knowledge of it we come to respect what the human beings of those ancient times devised and organized out of their imaginative faculty. When we read the old documents with this respect, we say: These men have accomplished great things purely spiritually and all out of imagination. To come to a thorough realization of this you need turn only to what men believe today. They believe they know something about the old Germanic gods—Wotan, Loki, for example. Pictures of them in human forms have appeared in certain books, Wotan with a flowing beard, Loki looking like a devil, with red hair, and so on. It is thought that the men of old, like the old Germans, had these ideas about Wotan and Loki. But that is not true, those men of old had, rather, the following conception: When the wind blows there is in it something spiritual—which is indeed true—Wotan is blowing in the wind. When they went into a wood, they never imagined they would meet Wotan there in the guise of an ordinary man. Describing a meeting with Wotan, they would have spoken of the wind blowing through the wood. This can still be felt in the very word Wotan by anyone who is sensitive to these things. And Loki—this did not call up a picture of someone sitting quietly in a corner; Loki's life was in the fire!

Indeed in various way, the people were always talking of Wotan and Loki. Suppose someone to be speaking about Wotan, for example: When you go over the mountain you may meet Wotan. Wotan will then make you either strong or weak according to your deserts. You see this is how people felt, hew they understood these matters. Today people say: That is superstition, a superstitious notion. But in those times they did not understand it so. They knew: When you go up there, to that corner so difficult to access, you do not meet a man in a body like any ordinary man. But the very shape of the mountain gives rise to a whirlwind which is met with especially in that place and a special kind of air is wafted up from an abyss. If you withstand this and keep to your path, you may become well or you may become sick. In what way you become well or ill, the people were willing to tell; they were in harmony with nature and would speak—not in an intellectual way but out of imagination. Our modern doctor would try to express himself intellectually—thus: If you have a tendency to tuberculosis, go up and sit at a certain height on a mountain every day, then come down. Go on doing this for some time; it will be most beneficial. This is the intellectual way of talking, but what one says when speaking imaginatively is this: Wotan is always to be found at that corner; it will help you if for a couple of weeks you visit him at a certain time each day.

This is the way in which people came to grips with life out of their imagination, and in this way too they worked. You will all at some time or other have been in a country district where the threshing was not done by machine but by hand—in time, in rhythm. The people know that if they have to thresh for days together and go to work without any rule, just at their own sweet will, they will soon be overcome by exhaustion. Threshing cannot be done in that way. If, however, they thresh in rhythm, if they keep in time together, exhaustion will be avoided, because this rhythm will be in harmony with the rhythm of their breathing and of the circulating blood. It makes a difference whether they beat with their flail on the out-breath or the in-breath, or whether they do it. as the breath is changing over from one to the other. Why is this? It is easy to see that it is nothing to do with the intellect, for today it no longer happens; everything of the kind is being wiped out. But work that was done by the people—for instance, the contrivances they had to tread or anything else in which time had to be kept—all this was done rhythmically.

Now, I don't fancy you can really think that if you take a piece of wood, a few strings and so on, and deal with them in a haphazard fashion, the result will be a violin. A violin results when mind, spirit, is exerted, when the wood is fashioned in a particular way, when the strings are put through a special process, and so on and so forth. This then is what we must say—particularly because people at that time did not yet think for themselves—the way in which machines were originally made could only be ascribed to possession by the spirit, that is to say, the people having the spirit working in them. For this reason, primitive men who did not work with intellect but with imagination were naturally inclined to talk of the spirit. When today someone constructs a machine by means of intellect, he does not say—and rightly does not say—that the spirit has been helping him. But when a man of those early times who was not conscious of thinking, had no capacity for thinking—when he constructed anything, he immediately felt: The spirit was helping me.

When the Europeans, the “superior” men, first arrived in American, and when even later, in the 19th century, they came to the regions where Indians such as belonged to more ancient times were still living, these Indians spoke of the “great Spirit” ruling everywhere. These primitive men in general have gone on speaking in this way of the Being ruling in everything. It was this “great Spirit” who was venerated particularly by the human beings living in Atlantean times when there was still land between Europe and America; the Indians still had this veneration, and knew nothing as yet of intellect. The. Indians then gradually came to know the “superior” men before being exterminated by them. Paper on which there were little signs, printed paper, was held in abhorrence by Indians; they took the little signs to be small devils and abominated them, for these signs were intellectual in origin. The man whose activities arise out of imagination abominates what comes from the intellect.

Now the European with his materialistic civilization knows how an engine is constructed. The intellectual way in which a European constructs his engine could never have been the way the ancient Greeks would have set about it, for the Greeks still lacked intellect. Intellect first came to man in the 15th or 16th century. The Greeks would have done their constructing with the help of their imagination. Since the Greeks ascribed to good spirits all natural forms and to bad spirits all that has no part in nature and is artificially produced, they would have spoken thus: In the engine there lives an evil spirit. They would certainly have done their constructing out of imagination and it would never ha/e occurred to them that in this they were not aided by the spirit.

You see therefore that ultimately we have to ascribe more spirit to the original primitive man; for imagination is of a more spiritual nature in the human soul than the mere intellect so highly prized today.

Old conditions, however, can never come back. Hence we have certainly to go forward, but not with the idea that what today exists in the animal as pure instinct can ever be developed into spirit. We ought not therefore to picture primitive men as having been possessed of mere instinct, for they realized: What is working in us is the spirit. This is why they had such belief in the spirit.

All this contributes a little to our understanding of how human evolution originated. So we must allow right on both sides—on the side of those who imagine human beings to have arisen from animal forms; well, so indeed they have, but not from such animal-forms as we have now, for these came into being later, when human beings were already in existence. But those animal-forms which in the course of human evolution have gradually grown into man's present form, together with the faculties existing at that time, have arisen because the spiritual—not intellectually, it is true, but imaginatively—was more perfect than it is today. At the same time we have always to remember: This original perfection depended upon man, though lacking freedom, being, as it were, possessed by the spirit. Intellect enables man to become free; by means of intellect, he can be freed.

Just consider this. Anyone who works with his intellect may say: At a certain time I am going to think out such and such a thing. This cannot be done by a poet for he still works today with imagination. Now Goethe was a great poet. When, because someone wanted him to write a poem, or he himself felt inclined to do so, he set himself down to write—well, the result was execrable! That people are not aware of this today comes simply from their inability to distinguish good poetry from bad. Among Goethe's poems there are many bad ones. Imaginative work can be done only when the mood is on the poet, and when the mood is on him he must write down the poem at once. You see, that is how it was in the case of primitive men. They were never able to do things out of free will at all. Free will is something that developed gradually, but not wisdom. Wisdom was originally greater than intellect and must re-acquire its greatness. That means our having to come back to the spirit by way of the intellect.

That, you see, is the task of anthroposophy; it has no wish to do what many people would like, that is, to bring back primitive conditions among men—old Indian wisdom, for example. It is nonsense when people harp on that; anthroposophy sets value on a return to the spirit precisely in full possession of the intellect, with intellect fully alive. It must be strictly borne in mind that we have nothing at all against the intellect; we have to go forward with it. To begin with, human beings had spirit without intellect; then the spirit fell away whereas the intellect increased» Now, by means of the intellect, we have to return to the spirit. Culture is obliged to take this course, for if it does not do so—well, people are always saying that the world war was unlike anything seen before and it is a fact that men have never before so torn each other to pieces—but if mankind refuses to take the course of bringing their intellect with them on their return to the spirit, then still greater wars will come upon up, wars that go on becoming more and more savage. Men will exterminate each other like two rats that, shut up together in a cage, gnaw each other till there is nothing left but two tails. That is putting it brutally, but in actual fact men are on the way to mutual extermination, and it is very important to know whither they are going.

• 1. This greatly simplified explanation of a very complicated process was given to the workmen in order to save time.

Dr. Steiner: Today, we have come together to discuss the results of the official school inspection. From what you told me over the telephone, I have formed a picture. Before I take any position, though, I think it would be a good idea to hear what each of you who participated in the inspection has to report, so that we all have a complete picture. I have repeatedly said that I am willing to meet with the man, but that has not occurred as yet.

We need to discuss all this to attain a perspective from which we can ward off any blows that may come from the public. It is unnecessary, and it would be fruitless, to make objections to the officials. If such things could be successful, we would not need a Waldorf School. The reason the Waldorf School exists is because the official bureaucracy does not understand our methods and our direction.

Let us go through the classes, then each of you can say what occurred in your class.

The teachers report about the inspection in each of the classes. The inspector had asked only very superficial questions..

Dr. Steiner: A boy in Zurich told me that he does not want to go to the school any more because the teaching through illustrative material was too dumb. When I gave the course in Berlin, I spoke about learning to read.1 Such things are very current and should be put into the Threefold newspaper and be used. For instance, how children learn to read, or the fact that our children—this is something I say everywhere—thank God, learn to read only at the age of eight or nine. We need to put such things right under people’s noses. They are certainly more important than some essay about a convention in Honolulu. We should also criticize the practice of failing children. We should mention that, too.

A teacher: He wanted to have quick answers in arithmetic.

Dr. Steiner: If children cannot do arithmetic quickly, their body is still slow.

A teacher: My perception is that what we teach children about grammar is something still foreign to them. Do we have to do that in the second grade?

Dr. Steiner: It depends upon how you do it. You do not always need to teach them the terminology, nouns and verbs, but use them only for yourself to form an objective polarity. A child of seven and a half can certainly differentiate between an activity and a thing. You do not need to emphasize the terminology. You could begin with stories and make the difference between a thing and an activity clear. That is something a child at that age can grasp. They should be able to grasp the difference between running or jumping and a human being or something of that sort. We do not need to follow the form of a pedantic grammar. In particular, with children in the lower grades, you should completely avoid using definitions.

There are further reports.

Dr. Steiner: (Laughingly, to a teacher who was happy about a positive remark made by the school inspector) Yes, you will certainly need to improve there.

The subject teachers report also.

Dr. Steiner: He will come to handwork class only with some old lady.

It is clear that this sort of inspection is an example of something that could never lead to an understanding of what actually happens in a school. When you think of the goodwill this man could have brought to understand at least a little about the Waldorf School, you will see that he had none whatsoever. He simply tried to determine to what extent the children meet the requirements of a regular school. He would need to know that he could learn something about what is actually going on only if he asks himself questions. He would have needed to ask himself how to question the children about what he wanted to know. His primary task should have been to find out from the children what they have learned, and the children would have needed to provide him with the possibility of asking the proper questions.

No one can learn very much if they simply ask the teachers questions, listen to the answers, but lack a firm foundation for forming a judgment about them. I make no assumption about that. There are a large number of psychological reasons why children answer their own teacher well or not. You need only recall how it is at the university for people who do their major examinations with the same professor they had for their seminars. It is easy for them. For the students who have not worked with the same professor, it is more difficult. Those who know the professor have an easy time. Having simply heard the professor’s lectures is not sufficient, since you could not discover his method of asking questions.

It is quite important to make the public aware of the things we consciously had to forego. We should use the space available to us in the “Threefold Social Organism” to present such things to the public. The different anthroposophical organizations here should work together, otherwise everything will dissipate. Everything is already falling apart, becoming unglued. We must work together. We need to publish articles, but of course, we should not obviously direct them at this particular point. That would be quite false. Nevertheless, the official inspection of the school could play a role. We should publish an article presenting, from various perspectives, how important it is for a child to learn to read only around the age of eight or nine. We could give examples like Goethe, who could not read and write until the age of nine, or Helmholtz, who learned to read and write only much later. We could, in contrast, give examples of people who learned to read and write at the age of four or five, then became complete idiots.

This is what we must do. If we do this properly, so that when we see ourselves in danger, and people everywhere are talking about these things, then we will have an effect. Then people could also not say that our intent is aimed at a very limited group. In this way, we can bring many of the weird judgments of the present into line. The actions of a person like the school inspector are simply an extract of the general perspective. If you turn to the entire civilized world using someone like that as an example, what you do will be good. The school inspection shows us what should not be done. Now we can turn to the world and try to make clear what should have been done.

A teacher: I have written an article for “Die Drei.”

Dr. Steiner: Make it short and sweet, don’t write ten pages about it. There is nothing to prevent something that appears in “Die Drei” from also appearing in “The Threefold.”

We’ve already talked about these things. A careful presentation of the impossibility of determining what a school is like by using such inspection methods could be one topic for discussion. Then we would have to defend against all the objections to teaching according to historical periods. When the inspector made his judgment, he said something very characteristic of our times, namely, that life requires people to do arithmetic quickly, and, therefore, we should teach that to the children.

Nearly everything you have said today offers wonderful examples of the way things should not be and how we can improve them. For instance, flunking children. The fact that he referred to the children as bright and dumb in front of the children is absolutely impossible.

He will probably also do what bad teachers always do. He will ask questions that require an exact answer and ignore everything else. He will have no sense of the way children express things. It is really very nice to receive a response from the children in their own way. It would be interesting to know what part of the poem he misunderstood.

You reported his remark that our method of teaching foreign language leads to a mechanical understanding.

These are the things we need to put out in public: Learning to read and write at a not-to-early age; a defense of teaching foreign language at an early age; flunking children; the manner of asking children questions; and, assuming that children will answer in exactly the way you expect them to. We should also mention superficial questions, senseless questions.

This is all connected to modern culture. These methods are decades old, and modern people have developed a spirituality, an attitude within their souls, that shows how they were mistreated as children. Today, only those who are more or less healthy, who have a counterforce within them, can hold up against that. The physical and psychological condition of modern people is often quite sad. That comes from such incorrect forming of questions. You can even see that in the physical body, that is, whether the forces of the soul have become incoherent. Many people take leave of their senses later. Many who still have their senses notice through their heart or lungs that they were mistreated by such things.

We need to be clear that if we did things to satisfy the education authorities, we would have to close. We could then simply put the children in any other school. They see the Waldorf School as an attack.

It is not so important to develop the letters the way they historically developed, since they developed differently in different regions. What is important is a renewal of the artistic path of work. We do not need to use historical forms. We must make that point very clear. From such events, we should learn what we must make clear.

A teacher: I asked the children in my seventh-grade class why they went along and behaved so well. They replied that they did not want to get me into trouble.

Dr. Steiner: That is wonderful behavior on the part of the children.

We should make notes of all of this so we can publicize it. There is so much interesting material that we could fill our publications with it. External activities and specific questions. We need to see that people pay more attention to us and learn more about our way of thinking if we want the Waldorf School movement to spread.

During the course I gave in Berlin, there was something that could also have been published. (Speaking to Dr. von Heydebrand) You remember you had said some things and then someone with an education background said that you had overemphasized the dark side. We should have stepped in then. We should have shown that you were not too extreme, that, in reality, things are very much worse. Experimental pedagogy is reasonable only in its basic ideas, but regarding other things, it is quite unreasonable. It is something only for professors who have to do as many experiments as possible.

The situation in Berlin was impossible. A discussion of barely an hour. There was sufficient time for many people to say really dumb things, but not enough time to defend yourself. In such cases, it would be better not even to speak. We should not leave our people out on a limb. It would be best not to give such presentations. We cannot allow only our opponents to be heard. The situation there was the best possible for those who want to hurt anthroposophy.

Our outside activities are, of course, connected with the outside, but they also belong here in the faculty.

A teacher asks whether they should start teaching Greek and Latin at the same time.

Dr. Steiner: The best, the ideal, would be to begin Greek earlier and then begin Latin after two years. However, that is difficult to do in practice. Then, we would have to drop something else for Greek, and that would be difficult. Our plans are designed to correspond to the individual and to development, so that doesn’t work out. Latin is required for external reasons. It is helpful to do things the way I described in my lecture in Berlin in order to slowly understand the language.

I based the entire development of language upon an imagination, but K. spoke of inspiration and intuition. People today have no sensibility for exact listening, and we need to take such things into account. The things I discussed need to be felt. That is something that can be taught through Greek. Latin is not as important because it does not teach feeling in the same way as Greek.

A teacher: How can we determine which children should attend that class?

Dr. Steiner: As long as we are only a single school, we cannot do much. Only when there are more schools could we make a decision of that sort according to their characteristics, that is, when we can influence the further course of the child’s life. That we have thirty percent who participate in this class is still too few to justify changing our plans for them. We need everything we have.

A teacher requests help with students in the upper grades, N.G. and F.S.

Dr. Steiner: With such difficult cases as N.G., we can approach him with understanding if he still has some belief in a person who can be completely objective about the life he has experienced. He grew up as an extremely lively little spirit from the very beginning. He gave many insightful answers. Now he is growing up with a mother who is the personification of a lie. She is one of those people who falls down with a heart attack, but on the soft carpet, not next to it. She is completely untrue. She is a woman who always wanted to bring Anthroposophy to her husband, a very superficial and trivial person. The children knew about this at an early age. This is one of the comedies in life that have such a tragic effect upon children that they lose all trust in life.

Now, the boy knows all this. He needs only the fulfillment he so much desires. He needs to be able to believe in a person. That is an opportunity he should have, namely to have people in his surroundings who are interested in telling the truth about even the most mundane of things.

A teacher: He says that he smells anthroposophy everywhere.

Dr. Steiner: In such cases, you can help him form a sound judgment if you take everything into account. The beliefs of such boys as N.G. are based upon the idea that everyone lies, but that can be cured. It could be difficult for him because he knows he was forced into the Waldorf School. For that reason, he now asks what is right. That is one thing.

Now that he is here in the Waldorf School, he must be able to find something that he can believe in anthroposophy. This is a truly Herculean task. It would have been quite normal for him to attend a school where life approached him from outside. The worst thing for such a boy is to place him in the Waldorf School. A child does not have to be in the Waldorf School. A school that pleases the school board could be a good school in which to spend your time from the age of six until fourteen. The Waldorf School is not necessarily the right school for everyone, but one day, there he was.

I am not sure it is pedagogically proper that F.S. is here. In 1908 I held a course about the Apocalypse. He occupied himself by digging deep holes in the garden soil. If you came close to him, he stood up and kicked you in the stomach. He never gave an answer. Once, an older lady wanted to do something nice for him, but he took some sand and threw it in her eyes. He broke nearly all of the coffee cups. He called himself “you” because people told him, “You did it.” If he is still behaving the same way, but at a higher level, then things have not improved. Now he would call himself, “I,” but for a different reason.

Somehow, we will have to come to grips with F.S. and N.G. Someone who has never been involved with his situation and in whom he can trust, will need to take over N.G. In the case of “you,” only someone who impresses him can help. He never knew his father very well. He needs someone who would impress him. (Speaking to a teacher) Can’t you do that? You have impressed many people. You certainly gave X.Y. the idea that you are impressive.

While I was in Berlin, someone approached me and told me about this boy. From that, I had an impression that the real reason for these things lies in his living conditions. We should try to avoid having anyone lodge there. X. does not like the Waldorf School. I promised the woman to ask you if he could live with one of you. He posed some questions concerning Schopenhauer, and that is quite positive. He also greets me very warmly.

A teacher asks about a child with curvature of the spine.

Dr. Steiner: He should be in the remedial class for a time. Let him do only what he wants, and discover what he does not want to do.

A language teacher complains about difficulties in the 7b English class.

Dr. Steiner: That is not at all surprising when you consider how their class teacher keeps them under control. That certainly calls forth a comparison. He knows what he wants. If she did not have him, but someone else instead, then (speaking to the language teacher) it would be much easier for you. You have a rather uncertain nature, and your own thoughts sit within the form of the children’s thoughts. These are things that would not occur to such an extent if you had a colleague more like yourself. The class teacher impresses the entire class because he is so much a part of things. You will have to break your terrible, vaguely lyrical, sentimental attitude when you go into the class.

The language teacher says something about boxing children’s ears.

Dr. Steiner: If you give them a slap, you should do it the way Dr. Schubert does.

Dr. Schubert: Did somebody complain?

Dr. Steiner: No, you are always slapping them.

Dr. Schubert: When did I do that?

Dr. Steiner: Well, I mean astral slapping. There are physical slaps and astral slaps. It doesn’t matter which one you give, but you cannot slap a child sentimentally.

The class reflects our thoughts. You need to be firmer in your own thoughts. If I were in your class, I would do the same. I would certainly behave terribly. I wouldn’t understand what is happening. I wouldn’t know what you want. You must be firmer in your thinking. The battle of a whole class against the teacher is not actually real, it is not something you can touch. We can talk about individual children, but not about a whole class. Look at the things Baravalle has written. Keep them until Whitsun. We cannot hold some lyrical discourses about a class. You seem to me today to be like one of those books from Husserl. Break your habit of thinking like that. It is a picture of your own inner nature.

We have to strongly integrate the art of teaching with the subject, but at the same time selflessly integrate it with the subject. Those are not common characteristics.

The 7a class has become quite good, and you can work well with them. The effectiveness of teaching depends upon the overall impression the teacher makes upon the children and not upon some small misdeeds or acts against authority. It is easy for a teacher to become laughable through some piece of clothing, but that will recede after a time. Perhaps you have a hole in your boot, but that is not very important. You cannot change those things. What is important is the humanity of the teacher.

The context of the following is unclear.

Dr. Steiner: They had the audience in their control. In the Vienna hall, Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony was presented in 1887. I attended a concert by Schalk. That was the first performance of Bruckner’s symphony.

A question is asked about four students in the 7a class.

Dr. Steiner: Will the children go into an apprenticeship? They are all nearly the same type. I would hope that things would become better if, with these children, you were to introduce a reading of a speech by Buddha objectively and formally, with all the repetitions, and then had them memorize short passages. You could also use The Bhagavad Gita. You could do that with the whole class. Go through it with the whole class and have those children copy it, then do it a second time and they should be able to present it. You should particularly aim at those children. This could also be done in teaching history and language. You could do that every day.

A teacher asks about a girl whose parents do not want her to participate in eurythmy.

Dr. Steiner: Convince the parents. She should not interrupt the eurythmy lessons.

A teacher asks about P.R., a student with a crippled hand.

Dr. Steiner: We should think about what profession we should direct him toward. He is not very dexterous with that hand. He writes poorly. He should become something like a bookkeeper, or some other job where that is not important. He certainly cannot become an actor. The best would be if we could bring such children so far along that they could then participate in the normal morning instruction, and then have some continuation of their education following elementary school. We need to try to bring him along so that he overcomes his self-consciousness and participates in handwork. He should certainly learn bookkeeping. We need to find a teacher for him.

A teacher: The elementary schools here have more periods of handwork.

Dr. Steiner: So much handwork is unnecessary.

A teacher: R.L. in the fourth grade is not coming to school.

Dr. Steiner: We cannot force the children if parents don’t want it.

We need to work practically with the things you mentioned today. There is no doubt that we have to take over a greater responsibility toward extending the movement so that the movement is not torn apart by some small thing one day. The whole world is looking at the Waldorf School, the whole civilized world. We must do a number of things well in the school that the movement is not doing very well in other areas. The main thing is that everyone in Stuttgart work together, that all the different groups connected with the movement, that is, really connected, find some way of working with one another.

When you are active in the anthroposophical movement on a broader scale, you will find that elsewhere people do not know how to relate to Stuttgart and what is happening here. It is important that the Waldorf School movement keep its promises. In particular, even though we may fail in other areas, the cultural areas need to be particularly strong in the world. The Waldorf School and its faculty need to always be careful to spread an understanding of themselves. Lectures like those given by Schwebsch, Stein, and Heydebrand are particularly effective. Answers to specific questions are often misunderstood.

The Waldorf teachers should not slide into that mistaken behavior so common today, that is, to write articles like the one X. wrote about the article from S.G. We will slowly die if we engage in normal journalism and a non-objective treatment of our work. It, the lecture from S.G., was certainly unbelievable, wasn’t it? I like S.G. quite a lot, but he needs to gradually learn what is important. For now, he is simply in his baby shoes. It makes our movement laughable. It is a hymn sung out of tune with the worst journalistic attitude. I would prefer to have said that when X. was here. It is a sad day, a very sad experience. We must remain above all that. There is not one uplifting thought in the entire article aside from those dealing with declamation and recitation. If we do such things that show so little goodwill to remain with the subject, if such habits enter our work, we will soon have a complete demise.

Concerning the education conference.

Dr. Steiner: It should be in a broader context that would enable us to work not from compromises, but toward the real perspective of our pedagogy. We do not want to do what was done at previous conferences and simply talk about things. We should discuss things in such a way that people genuinely understand them. We must create a feeling that our people already know what others want to say. Our people should not simply stand there while someone else says something we do not know. We must know which of the questions could arise in the conference. We cannot allow people to say we are poking our noses into everything, but when experts come along, you can see how little we know. We need to arrange things so that someone cannot come along and say something and there not be enough time for us to reply.

That must not happen. It was a real problem in Berlin since people went away thinking that we spoke about Einstein, but knew nothing about him. Aside from that, the discussion leader thought that idiot was right. The others who put on the symposium also thought the same thing. In any event, it happened—something that had a detrimental effect upon the whole scientific mood from the very beginning. The first problem was that Rittelmeyer came along and said we had done poorly. Such things simply must not happen. If that were to happen here with pedagogy, it would be terrible. The listeners should perceive that our work and each speaker is of a high level.

We have put enormous effort into setting something up. The conferences have had an enormous success, but no one lets the results of the conferences be truly effective. If we could only find a way to let what we accomplish have a practical effect. What you have to say does not actually affect people. Afterward, no one actually knows what you have to say. Our work needs to be used more. We need to affect opinions. However, I am convinced that this thing with X. will be forgotten. For example, we have long had the problem that we have an economic movement, but we cannot get any economists to speak about it. The economic perspective is important. Leinhas’s lecture was good, and people will not forget it. The same is true for Dr. Unger’s essay about valuation. That is the beginning of something we should further develop in economics. Now, however, we must talk about the existence of three pillars that should in some way be comprehensive.

Everywhere I went in my long series of lectures, I mentioned the lectures given by you, Dr. von Heydebrand, and Leinhas. I spoke of them everywhere. We must create opinion. Our work must speak to people. Pedagogy needs an opinion connected with the substance of our movement. We can ignore negative opinions. We must do what is good.

That is something that is painful for me, but I want you to know it because the Waldorf School has developed that good spirit. This does not need to be said to the Waldorf School itself. The Waldorf School has a great task because there is no leadership in other areas. The school is moving along well, but it has a responsibility to take up some things that have an even larger responsibility associated with them. When something negative occurs now, with the increasing number of followers, then it is a negative event that is actually gigantic. That would, of course, not happen with the Waldorf School. Such things can tear a spiritual or cultural movement apart. For that reason, those working in the Waldorf School need to be the primary support for the whole movement. That is how things are today. The Waldorf School has a broad basis because it has kept all its promises. It can, therefore, be the primary support for the entire anthroposophical movement. We need such a support today. Your responsibility is quickly growing. That is something each of you needs to take to heart. We haven’t the least reason to be happy when the number of followers increases. We should be aware that every increase in interest is also an increase in our own responsibility.

A teacher asks about a pedagogical conference in Kaiserslautern.

Dr. Steiner: We have already decided against the proposal for Bremen. I looked at the big picture. We cannot accomplish much by systematically discussing pedagogy before there is any possibility of seeing some movement in regard to pedagogical questions in modern times. The seventy or so people who would come there would come only out of politeness. They would not know what is needed. We would first have to tell them that something is happening in the world. We would first have to hold a cultural and historical lecture on pedagogy. That would be necessary. Giving a three-day course for people whom you cannot help any further would mean too much wasted strength.

We saw that here. The teachers were the least interested. They all said they could not attend. I am uncertain if that has gotten better, but what else could happen?

We must awaken people’s awareness of what needs to be done. I’m afraid people believe we should begin the threefold. I think that if two or three of you want to give a lecture there on the return trip from Holland, that would be good. People need to be aware. God, there was a conference in Stuttgart and then one in Berlin. Now things need to be made more well known, otherwise we will be running to every village giving lectures. It is enough when we do that in some of the central areas. It is not efficient if we are running everywhere. We must improve the efficiency of our work.

A teacher: Is there something concrete we could do in Berlin?

Dr. Steiner: Quite a lot. We could discuss a large number of questions there and essentially nowhere else in the world today, but theology is too strong there. There were a large number of questions that could be treated nowhere else in the world. We need to make the lectures more well known. The question is, how? Steffen printed the “Christmas Conference” in Das Goetheanum in such a way that I would almost prefer to print his report than my lectures. He did a wonderful job there.

When such dry reports are published, the kind people are used to seeing in academic journals, then people have difficulty getting through them. Not just my own lectures, but also those of others, were written in an indescribably pedantic way. In that case, I can only say there is not much goodwill behind them. R. could do it better. When he gives a lecture, it is really very good, but when he writes something, it would drive you up the walls. Here, we see no goodwill. Such things wash the ground away from under our feet.

What is Memory According to Theosophical Teaching?

Enq. The most difficult thing for you to do, will be to explain and give reasonable grounds for such a belief. No Theosophist has ever yet succeeded in bringing forward a single valid proof to shake my scepticism. First of all, you have against this theory of re-incarnation, the fact that no single man has yet been found to remember that he has lived, least of all who he was, during his previous life.

Theo. Your argument, I see, tends to the same old objection; the loss of memory in each of us of our previous incarnation. You think it invalidates our doctrine? My answer is that it does not, and that at any rate such an objection cannot be final.

Enq. I would like to hear your arguments.

Theo. They are short and few. Yet when you take into consideration (a) the utter inability of the best modern psychologists to explain to the world the nature of mind; and (b) their complete ignorance of its potentialities, and higher states, you have to admit that this objection is based on an a priori conclusion drawn from prima facie and circumstantial evidence more than anything else. Now what is "memory" in your conception, pray?

Enq. That which is generally accepted: the faculty in our mind of remembering and of retaining the knowledge of previous thoughts, deeds and events.

Theo. Please add to it that there is a great difference between the three accepted forms of memory. Besides memory in general you have Remembrance, Recollection and Reminiscence, have you not? Have you ever thought over the difference? Memory, remember, is a generic name.

Enq. Yet, all these are only synonyms.

Theo. Indeed, they are not — not in philosophy, at all events. Memory is simply an innate power in thinking beings, and even in animals, of reproducing past impressions by an association of ideas principally suggested by objective things or by some action on our external sensory organs. Memory is a faculty depending entirely on the more or less healthy and normal functioning of our physical brain; and remembrance and recollection are the attributes and handmaidens of that memory. But reminiscence is an entirely different thing. "Reminiscence" is defined by the modern psychologist as something intermediate between remembrance and recollection, or "a conscious process of recalling past occurrences, but without that full and varied reference to particular things which characterises recollection." Locke, speaking of recollection and remembrance, says: "When an idea again recurs without the operation of the like object on the external sensory, it is remembrance; if it be sought after by the mind, and with pain and endeavour found and brought again into view, it is recollection." But even Locke leaves reminiscence without any clear definition, because it is no faculty or attribute of our physical memory, but an intuitional perception apart from and outside our physical brain; a perception which, covering as it does (being called into action by the ever-present knowledge of our spiritual Ego) all those visions in man which are regarded as abnormal — from the pictures suggested by genius to the ravings of fever and even madness — are classed by science as having no existence outside of our fancy. Occultism and Theosophy, however, regard reminiscence in an entirely different light. For us, while memory is physical and evanescent and depends on the physiological conditions of the brain — a fundamental proposition with all teachers of mnemonics, who have the researches of modern scientific psychologists to back them — we call reminiscence the memory of the soul. And it is this memory which gives the assurance to almost every human being, whether he understands it or not, of his having lived before and having to live again. Indeed, as Wordsworth has it:

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath elsewhere had its setting,
And cometh from afar."

Enq. If it is on this kind of memory — poetry and abnormal fancies, on your own confession — that you base your doctrine, then you will convince very few, I am afraid.

Theo. I did not "confess" it was a fancy. I simply said that physiologists and scientists in general regard such reminiscences as hallucinations and fancy, to which learned conclusion they are welcome. We do not deny that such visions of the past and glimpses far back into the corridors of time, are not abnormal, as contrasted with our normal daily life experience and physical memory. But we do maintain with Professor W. Knight, that "the absence of memory of any action done in a previous state cannot be a conclusive argument against our having lived through it." And every fair-minded opponent must agree with what is said in Butler's Lectures on Platonic Philosophy — "that the feeling of extravagance with which it (pre-existence) affects us has its secret source in materialistic or semi-materialistic prejudices." Besides which we maintain that memory, as Olympiodorus called it, is simply phantasy, and the most unreliable thing in us.¹ Ammonius Saccas asserted that the only faculty in man directly opposed to prognostication, or looking into futurity, is memory. Furthermore, remember that memory is one thing and mind or thought is another; one is a recording machine, a register which very easily gets out of order; the other (thoughts) are eternal and imperishable. Would you refuse to believe in the existence of certain things or men only because your physical eyes have not seen them? Would not the collective testimony of past generations who have seen him be a sufficient guarantee that Julius Caesar once lived? Why should not the same testimony of the psychic senses of the masses be taken into consideration?

Enq. But don't you think that these are too fine distinctions to be accepted by the majority of mortals?

Theo. Say rather by the majority of materialists. And to them we say, behold: even in the short span of ordinary existence, memory is too weak to register all the events of a lifetime. How frequently do even most important events lie dormant in our memory until awakened by some association of ideas, or aroused to function and activity by some other link. This is especially the case with people of advanced age, who are always found suffering from feebleness of recollection. When, therefore, we remember that which we know about the physical and the spiritual principles in man, it is not the fact that our memory has failed to record our precedent life and lives that ought to surprise us, but the contrary, were it to happen.

Why Do We Not Remember Our Past Lives?

Enq. You have given me a bird's eye view of the seven principles; now how do they account for our complete loss of any recollection of having lived before?

Theo. Very easily. Since those "principles" which we call physical, and none of which is denied by science, though it calls them by other names,² are disintegrated after death with their constituent elements, memory along with its brain, this vanished memory of a vanished personality, can neither remember nor record anything in the subsequent reincarnation of the EGO. Reincarnation means that this Ego will be furnished with a new body, a new brain, and a new memory. Therefore it would be as absurd to expect this memory to remember that which it has never recorded as it would be idle to examine under a microscope a shirt never worn by a murderer, and seek on it for the stains of blood which are to be found only on the clothes he wore. It is not the clean shirt that we have to question, but the clothes worn during the perpetration of the crime; and if these are burnt and destroyed, how can you get at them?

Enq. Aye! how can you get at the certainty that the crime was ever committed at all, or that the "man in the clean shirt" ever lived before?

Theo. Not by physical processes, most assuredly; nor by relying on the testimony of that which exists no longer. But there is such a thing as circumstantial evidence, since our wise laws accept it, more, perhaps, even than they should. To get convinced of the fact of re-incarnation and past lives, one must put oneself in rapport with one's real permanent Ego, not one's evanescent memory.

Enq. But how can people believe in that which they do not know, nor have ever seen, far less put themselves in rapport with it?

Theo. If people, and the most learned, will believe in the Gravity, Ether, Force, and what not of Science, abstractions "and working hypotheses," which they have neither seen, touched, smelt, heard, nor tasted — why should not other people believe, on the same principle, in one's permanent Ego, a far more logical and important "working hypothesis" than any other?

Enq. What is, finally, this mysterious eternal principle? Can you explain its nature so as to make it comprehensible to all?

Theo. The EGO which re-incarnates, the individual and immortal — not personal — "I"; the vehicle, in short, of the Atma-Buddhic MONAD, that which is rewarded in Devachan and punished on earth, and that, finally, to which the reflection only of the Skandhas, or attributes, of every incarnation attaches itself.³

Enq. What do you mean by Skandhas?

Theo. Just what I said: "attributes," among which is memory, all of which perish like a flower, leaving behind them only a feeble perfume. Here is another paragraph from H. S. Olcott's "Buddhist Catechism" ⁴ which bears directly upon the subject. It deals with the question as follows: — "The aged man remembers the incidents of his youth, despite his being physically and mentally changed. Why, then, is not the recollection of past lives brought over by us from our last birth into the present birth? Because memory is included within the Skandhas, and the Skandhas having changed with the new existence, a memory, the record of that particular existence, develops. Yet the record or reflection of all the past lives must survive, for when Prince Siddhartha became Buddha, the full sequence of His previous births were seen by Him. . . . and any one who attains to the state of Jhana can thus retrospectively trace the line of his lives." This proves to you that while the undying qualities of the personality — such as love, goodness, charity, etc. — attach themselves to the immortal Ego, photographing on it, so to speak, a permanent image of the divine aspect of the man who was, his material Skandhas (those which generate the most marked Karmic effects) are as evanescent as a flash of lightning, and cannot impress the new brain of the new personality; yet their failing to do so impairs in no way the identity of the re-incarnating Ego.

Enq. Do you mean to infer that that which survives is only the Soul-memory, as you call it, that Soul or Ego being one and the same, while nothing of the personality remains?

Theo. Not quite; something of each personality, unless the latter was an absolute materialist with not even a chink in his nature for a spiritual ray to pass through, must survive, as it leaves its eternal impress on the incarnating permanent Self or Spiritual Ego.⁵ (See On post mortem and post natal Consciousness.) The personality with its Skandhas is ever changing with every new birth. It is, as said before, only the part played by the actor (the true Ego) for one night. This is why we preserve no memory on the physical plane of our past lives, though the real "Ego" has lived them over and knows them all.

Enq. Then how does it happen that the real or Spiritual man does not impress his new personal "I" with this knowledge?

Theo. How is it that the servant-girls in a poor farm-house could speak Hebrew and play the violin in their trance or somnambulic state, and knew neither when in their normal condition? Because, as every genuine psychologist of the old, not your modern, school, will tell you, the Spiritual Ego can act only when the personal Ego is paralysed. The Spiritual "I" in man is omniscient and has every knowledge innate in it; while the personal self is the creature of its environment and the slave of the physical memory. Could the former manifest itself uninterruptedly, and without impediment, there would be no longer men on earth, but we should all be gods.

Enq. Still there ought to be exceptions, and some ought to remember.

Theo. And so there are. But who believes in their report? Such sensitives are generally regarded as hallucinated hysteriacs, as crack-brained enthusiasts, or humbugs, by modern materialism. Let them read, however, works on this subject, pre-eminently "Reincarnation, a Study of Forgotten Truth" by E. D. Walker, F. T. S., and see in it the mass of proofs which the able author brings to bear on this vexed question. One speaks to people of soul, and some ask "What is Soul?" "Have you ever proved its existence?" Of course it is useless to argue with those who are materialists. But even to them I would put the question: "Can you remember what you were or did when a baby? Have you preserved the smallest recollection of your life, thoughts, or deeds, or that you lived at all during the first eighteen months or two years of your existence? Then why not deny that you have ever lived as a babe, on the same principle?" When to all this we add that the reincarnating Ego, or individuality, retains during the Devachanic period merely the essence of the experience of its past earth-life or personality, the whole physical experience involving into a state of in potentia, or being, so to speak, translated into spiritual formulae; when we remember further that the term between two rebirths is said to extend from ten to fifteen centuries, during which time the physical consciousness is totally and absolutely inactive, having no organs to act through, and therefore no existence, the reason for the absence of all remembrance in the purely physical memory is apparent.

Enq. You just said that the SPIRITUAL EGO was omniscient. Where, then, is that vaunted omniscience during his Devachanic life, as you call it?

Theo. During that time it is latent and potential, because, first of all, the Spiritual Ego (the compound of Buddhi-Manas) is not the HIGHER SELF, which being one with the Universal Soul or Mind is alone omniscient; and, secondly, because Devachan is the idealized continuation of the terrestrial life just left behind, a period of retributive adjustment, and a reward for unmerited wrongs and sufferings undergone in that special life. It is omniscient only potentially in Devachan, and de facto exclusively in Nirvana, when the Ego is merged in the Universal Mind-Soul. Yet it rebecomes quasi omniscient during those hours on earth when certain abnormal conditions and physiological changes in the body make the Ego free from the trammels of matter. Thus the examples cited above of somnambulists, a poor servant speaking Hebrew, and another playing the violin, give you an illustration of the case in point. This does not mean that the explanations of these two facts offered us by medical science have no truth in them, for one girl had, years before, heard her master, a clergyman, read Hebrew works aloud, and the other had heard an artist playing a violin at their farm. But neither could have done so as perfectly as they did had they not been ensouled by THAT which, owing to the sameness of its nature with the Universal Mind, is omniscient. Here the higher principle acted on the Skandhas and moved them; in the other, the personality being paralysed, the individuality manifested itself. Pray do not confuse the two.

On Individuality and Personality

Enq. But what is the difference between the two? I confess that I am still in the dark. Indeed it is just that difference, then, that you cannot impress too much on our minds.⁶

Theo. I try to; but alas, it is harder with some than to make them feel a reverence for childish impossibilities, only because they are orthodox, and because orthodoxy is respectable. To understand the idea well, you have to first study the dual sets of "principles": the spiritual, or those which belong to the imperishable Ego; and the material, or those principles which make up the ever-changing bodies or the series of personalities of that Ego. Let us fix permanent names to these, and say that: —

1. Atma, the "Higher Self," is neither your Spirit nor mine, but like sunlight shines on all. It is the universally diffused "divine principle," and is inseparable from its one and absolute Meta-Spirit, as the sunbeam is inseparable from sunlight.
2. Buddhi (the spiritual soul) is only its vehicle. Neither each separately, nor the two collectively, are of any more use to the body of man, than sunlight and its beams are for a mass of granite buried in the earth, unless the divine Duad is assimilated by, and reflected in, some consciousness. Neither Atma nor Buddhi are ever reached by Karma, because the former is the highest aspect of Karma, its working agent of ITSELF in one aspect, and the other is unconscious on this plane. This consciousness or mind is,
3. Manas,⁷ the derivation or product in a reflected form of Ahamkara, "the conception of I," or EGO-SHIP. It is, therefore, when inseparably united to the first two, called the SPIRITUAL EGO, and Taijasi (the radiant). This is the real Individuality, or the divine man. It is this Ego which — having originally incarnated in the senseless human form animated by, but unconscious (since it had no consciousness) of, the presence in itself of the dual monad — made of that human-like form a real man. It is that Ego, that "Causal Body," which overshadows every personality Karma forces it to incarnate into; and this Ego which is held responsible for all the sins committed through, and in, every new body or personality — the evanescent masks which hide the true Individual through the long series of rebirths.

Enq. But is this just? Why should this Ego receive punishment as the result of deeds which it has forgotten?

Theo. It has not forgotten them; it knows and remembers its misdeeds as well as you remember what you have done yesterday. Is it because the memory of that bundle of physical compounds called "body" does not recollect what its predecessor (the personality that was) did, that you imagine that the real Ego has forgotten them? As well say it is unjust that the new boots on the feet of a boy, who is flogged for stealing apples, should be punished for that which they know nothing of.

Enq. But are there no modes of communication between the Spiritual and human consciousness or memory?

Theo. Of course there are; but they have never been recognised by your scientific modern psychologists. To what do you attribute intuition, the "voice of the conscience," premonitions, vague undefined reminiscences, etc., etc., if not to such communications? Would that the majority of educated men, at least, had the fine spiritual perceptions of Coleridge, who shows how intuitional he is in some of his comments. Hear what he says with respect to the probability that "all thoughts are in themselves imperishable." "If the intelligent faculty (sudden 'revivals' of memory) should be rendered more comprehensive, it would require only a different and appropriate organization, the body celestial instead of the body terrestrial, to bring before every human soul the collective experience of its whole past existence (existences, rather)." And this body celestial is our Manasic EGO.

On The Reward and Punishment of The Ego

Enq. I have heard you say that the Ego, whatever the life of the person he incarnated in may have been on Earth, is never visited with post-mortem punishment.

Theo. Never, save in very exceptional and rare cases of which we will not speak here, as the nature of the "punishment" in no way approaches any of your theological conceptions of damnation.

Enq. But if it is punished in this life for the misdeeds committed in a previous one, then it is this Ego that ought to be rewarded also, whether here, or when disincarnated.

Theo. And so it is. If we do not admit of any punishment outside of this earth, it is because the only state the Spiritual Self knows of, hereafter, is that of unalloyed bliss.

Enq. What do you mean?

Theo. Simply this: crimes and sins committed on a plane of objectivity and in a world of matter, cannot receive punishment in a world of pure subjectivity. We believe in no hell or paradise as localities; in no objective hell-fires and worms that never die, nor in any Jerusalems with streets paved with sapphires and diamonds. What we believe in is a post-mortem state or mental condition, such as we are in during a vivid dream. We believe in an immutable law of absolute Love, Justice, and Mercy. And believing in it, we say: "Whatever the sin and dire results of the original Karmic transgression of the now incarnated Egos ⁸ no man (or the outer material and periodical form of the Spiritual Entity) can be held, with any degree of justice, responsible for the consequences of his birth. He does not ask to be born, nor can he choose the parents that will give him life. In every respect he is a victim to his environment, the child of circumstances over which he has no control; and if each of his transgressions were impartially investigated, there would be found nine out of every ten cases when he was the one sinned against, rather than the sinner. Life is at best a heartless play, a stormy sea to cross, and a heavy burden often too difficult to bear. The greatest philosophers have tried in vain to fathom and find out its raison d'etre, and have all failed except those who had the key to it, namely, the Eastern sages. Life is, as Shakespeare describes it: —

". . . . but a walking shadow — a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. . . . ."

Nothing in its separate parts, yet of the greatest importance in its collectivity or series of lives. At any rate, almost every individual life is, in its full development, a sorrow. And are we to believe that poor, helpless man, after being tossed about like a piece of rotten timber on the angry billows of life, is, if he proves too weak to resist them, to be punished by a sempiternity of damnation, or even a temporary punishment? Never! Whether a great or an average sinner, good or bad, guilty or innocent, once delivered of the burden of physical life, the tired and worn-out Manu ("thinking Ego") has won the right to a period of absolute rest and bliss. The same unerringly wise and just rather than merciful Law, which inflicts upon the incarnated Ego the Karmic punishment for every sin committed during the preceding life on Earth, provided for the now disembodied Entity a long lease of mental rest, i.e., the entire oblivion of every sad event, aye, to the smallest painful thought, that took place in its last life as a personality, leaving in the soul-memory but the reminiscence of that which was bliss, or led to happiness. Plotinus, who said that our body was the true river of Lethe, for "souls plunged into it forget all," meant more than he said. For, as our terrestrial body is like Lethe, so is our celestial body in Devachan, and much more.

Enq. Then am I to understand that the murderer, the transgressor of law divine and human in every shape, is allowed to go unpunished?

Theo. Who ever said that? Our philosophy has a doctrine of punishment as stern as that of the most rigid Calvinist, only far more philosophical and consistent with absolute justice. No deed, not even a sinful thought, will go unpunished; the latter more severely even than the former, as a thought is far more potential in creating evil results than even a deed.⁹ We believe in an unerring law of Retribution, called KARMA, which asserts itself in a natural concatenation of causes and their unavoidable results.

Enq. And how, or where, does it act?

Theo. Every labourer is worthy of his hire, saith Wisdom in the Gospel; every action, good or bad, is a prolific parent, saith the Wisdom of the Ages. Put the two together, and you will find the "why." After allowing the Soul, escaped from the pangs of personal life, a sufficient, aye, a hundredfold compensation, Karma, with its army of Skandhas, waits at the threshold of Devachan, whence the Ego re-emerges to assume a new incarnation. It is at this moment that the future destiny of the now-rested Ego trembles in the scales of just Retribution, as it now falls once again under the sway of active Karmic law. It is in this rebirth which is ready for it, a rebirth selected and prepared by this mysterious, inexorable, but in the equity and wisdom of its decrees infallible LAW, that the sins of the previous life of the Ego are punished. Only it is into no imaginary Hell, with theatrical flames and ridiculous tailed and horned devils, that the Ego is cast, but verily on to this earth, the plane and region of his sins, where he will have to atone for every bad thought and deed. As he has sown, so will he reap. Reincarnation will gather around him all those other Egos who have suffered, whether directly or indirectly, at the hands, or even through the unconscious instrumentality, of the past personality. They will be thrown by Nemesis in the way of the new man, concealing the old, the eternal EGO, and . . . .

Enq. But where is the equity you speak of, since these new "personalities" are not aware of having sinned or been sinned against?

Theo. Has the coat torn to shreds from the back of the man who stole it, by another man who was robbed of it and recognises his property, to be regarded as fairly dealt with? The new "personality" is no better than a fresh suit of clothes with its specific characteristics, colour, form and qualities; but the real man who wears it is the same culprit as of old. It is the individuality who suffers through his "personality." And it is this, and this alone, that can account for the terrible, still only apparent, injustice in the distribution of lots in life to man. When your modern philosophers will have succeeded in showing to us a good reason, why so many apparently innocent and good men are born only to suffer during a whole life-time; why so many are born poor unto starvation in the slums of great cities, abandoned by fate and men; why, while these are born in the gutter, others open their eyes to light in palaces; while a noble birth and fortune seem often given to the worst of men and only rarely to the worthy; while there are beggars whose inner selves are peers to the highest and noblest of men; when this, and much more, is satisfactorily explained by either your philosophers or theologians, then only, but not till then, you will have the right to reject the theory of reincarnation. The highest and grandest of poets have dimly perceived this truth of truths. Shelley believed in it, Shakespeare must have thought of it when writing on the worthlessness of Birth. Remember his words:

"Why should my birth keep down my mounting spirit?
Are not all creatures subject unto time?
There's legions now of beggars on the earth,
That their original did spring from Kings,
And many monarchs now, whose fathers were
The riff-raff of their age . . . . . . ."

Alter the word "fathers" into "Egos" — and you will have the truth.

• 1. "The phantasy," says Olympiodorus (in Platonis Phaed.), "is an impediment to our intellectual conceptions; and hence, when we are agitated by the inspiring influence of the Divinity, if the phantasy intervenes, the enthusiastic energy ceases: for enthusiasm and the ecstasy are contrary to each other. Should it be asked whether the soul is able to energise without the phantasy, we reply, that its perception of universals proves that it is able. It has perceptions, therefore, independent of the phantasy; at the same time, however, the phantasy attends in its energies, just as a storm pursues him who sails on the sea."
• 2. Namely, the body, life, passional and animal instincts, and the astral eidolon of every man (whether perceived in thought or our mind's eye, or objectively and separate from the physical body), which principles we call Sthula sarira, Prana, Kama rupa, and Linga sarira (vide supra).
• 3. There are five Skandhas or attributes in the Buddhist teachings: "Rupa (form or body), material qualities; Vedana, sensation; Sanna, abstract ideas; Samkhara, tendencies of mind; Vinnana, mental powers. Of these we are formed; by them we are conscious of existence; and through them communicate with the world about us."
• 4. By H. S. Olcott, President and Founder of the Theosophical Society. The accuracy of the teaching is sanctioned by the Rev. H. Sumangala, High Priest of the Sripada and Galle, and Principal of the Widyodaya Parivena (College) at Colombo, as being in agreement with the Canon of the Southern Buddhist Church.
• 5. Or the Spiritual, in contradistinction to the personal Self. The student must not confuse this Spiritual Ego with the "HIGHER SELF" which is Atma, the God within us, and inseparable from the Universal Spirit.
• 6. Even in his Buddhist Catechism, Col. Olcott, forced to it by the logic of Esoteric philosophy, found himself obliged to correct the mistakes of previous Orientalists who made no such distinction, and gives the reader his reasons for it. Thus he says: "The successive appearances upon the earth, or 'descents into generation,' of the tanhaically coherent parts (Skandhas) of a certain being, are a succession of personalities. In each birth the PERSONALITY differs from that of a previous or next succeeding birth. Karma, the DEUS EX MACHINA, masks (or shall we say reflects?) itself now in the personality of a sage, again as an artisan, and so on throughout the string of births. But though personalities ever shift, the one line of life along which they are strung, like beads, runs unbroken; it is ever that particular line, never any other. It is therefore individual, an individual vital undulation, which began in Nirvana, or the subjective side of nature, as the light or heat undulation through aether began at its dynamic source; is careering through the objective side of nature under the impulse of Karma and the creative direction of Tanha (the unsatisfied desire for existence); and leads through many cyclic changes back to Nirvana. Mr. Rhys-Davids calls that which passes from personality to personality along the individual chain 'character,' or 'doing.' Since 'character' is not a mere metaphysical abstraction, but the sum of one's mental qualities and moral propensities, would it not help to dispel what Mr. Rhys-Davids calls 'the desperate expedient of a mystery' (Buddhism, p. 101) if we regarded the life-undulation as individuality, and each of its series of natal manifestations as a separate personality? The perfect individual, Buddhistically speaking, is a Buddha, I should say; for Buddha is but the rare flower of humanity, without the least supernatural admixture. And as countless generations ('four asankheyyas and a hundred thousand cycles,' Fausboll and Rhys-Davids' BUDDHIST BIRTH STORIES, p. 13) are required to develop a man into a Buddha, and the iron will to become one runs throughout all the successive births, what shall we call that which thus wills and perseveres? Character? One's individuality: an individuality but partly manifested in any one birth, but built up of fragments from all the births?" (Bud. Cat., Appendix A. 137.)
• 7. MAHAT or the "Universal Mind" is the source of Manas. The latter is Mahat, i.e., mind, in man. Manas is also called Kshetrajna, "embodied Spirit," because it is, according to our philosophy, the Manasa-putras, or "Sons of the Universal Mind," who created, or rather produced, the thinking man, "manu," by incarnating in the third Race mankind in our Round. It is Manas, therefore, which is the real incarnating and permanent Spiritual Ego, the INDIVIDUALITY, and our various and numberless personalities only its external masks.
• 8. It is on this transgression that the cruel and illogical dogma of the Fallen Angels has been built. It is explained in Vol. II. of the Secret Doctrine. All our "Egos" are thinking and rational entities (Manasa-putras)who had lived, whether under human or other forms, in the precedent life-cycle (Manvantara), and whose Karma it was to incarnate in the man of this one. It was taught in the MYSTERIES that, having delayed to comply with this law (or having "refused to create" as Hinduism says of the Kumaras and Christian legend of the Archangel Michael), i. e., having failed to incarnate in due time, the bodies predestined for them got defiled (Vide Stanzas VIII. and IX. in the "Slokas of Dzyan," Vol. II. Secret Doctrine, pp. 19 and 20), hence the original sin of the senseless forms and the punishment of the Egos. That which is meant by the rebellious angels being hurled down into Hell is simply explained by these pure Spirits or Egos being imprisoned in bodies of unclean matter, flesh.
• 9. "Verily, I say unto you, that whosoever looketh at a woman to lust after her, hath committed adultery with her already in his heart." (Matt. v., 28.)

Yesterday we began with a subject I referred to as a kind of exploration of conscience that is appropriate for our time and especially necessary for the teacher of children in their fourteenth and fifteenth years. Not only ought this age that outwardly manifests in sexual maturity to be dealt with at the actual time; it ought to be kept in mind throughout the school years. Because our own education—or miseducation—was such that as a result there can be no real understanding of children, especially children in this age group, this kind of higher exploration of conscience has become essential.

We can visualize this situation by proceeding as follows. Let us consider the human being between twenty-one and twentyeight years. Spiritual science speaks of the birth of the ego, the time when the ego actually comes fully into its own in life. We emphasized the fact that the ego of the girl at about the fourteenth or fifteenth year is absorbed into the astral body, is therefore not yet independent, while the girl’s astral body has already attained a certain independence at this age. The ego of the boy, we said, is not absorbed into the astral body; it leads a kind of withdrawn life. And I explained that both these tendencies, these characteristics, can indeed be seen as the result of the inner human development.

But when the I, the ego, fully comes into its own at about the twenty-first year, this shows itself in one human being looking for and finding others, and this in the fullest sense of the word: other human beings. This is such a specific characteristic of this age. When, let’s say, a twenty-four-year-old finds a twenty-one-year-old—but not younger than twentyone or older than twenty-eight—the two will be in an equal, reciprocal relationship in all areas: spirit, soul, body. During this age, we really interact with, relate to others in this age group as equals.

This observation is of special significance for anyone who wishes to be involved in education. All the psychological fiddle- faddle that is frequently practiced is a mere playing with clever words. If we today wish to understand life, we have to observe such things as this special nuance that is present in human beings when they meet one another between their twenty-first and twenty-eighth years.

Let us now consider other age groups: a youth between the age of fourteen and twenty-one and someone between twentyeight and thirty-five. Regardless of their sexes, it will not be possible for them to relate fully as equals. And yet, provided certain conditions we shall presently discuss are met, a significant relationship can be established between them. If a youth aged fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen meets a twenty-eight-, twentynine-, or thirty-year-old person, the matter is as follows. Engendered by the astral body, the physical development between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one, the characteristic outer behavior, the improving skills, the ideals, the way the young find their way into outer life—this is subject to unconsciousness, just as the physical life proceeds unconsciously when developing to the outside.

The same development emerges as a soul form in the inner life of those between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-five. This is the reason why persons in this age group are especially predestined for understanding, for feeling, the processes taking place in adolescents. And adolescents are especially suited to look up to people between the ages of twenty-eight and thirtyfive, because they can see inwardly active in those between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-five what is in themselves more or less unconsciously manifesting physically in connection to the world outside.

The knowledge of the connection between these age groups was still very much present in ancient Greece. It was instinctively experienced. When Greek children looked up to the older ones they felt instinctively, not fully consciously: “They have in their souls what we have in our bodies; we see something coming to us from them in a refined way, what we have in our physical bodies.” And the twenty-eight or twenty-nine-year- old Greeks took immense pleasure in what they saw developing and manifesting in the fourteen-, fifteen-, and sixteen- year-olds. There was this real relation between age groups, this instinctive life—not as in our culture, where people only relate in an abstract way—in which one was important for the other person by virtue of one’s age. The Greeks still experienced this instinctive relationship in an extraordinarily strong way, and it really affected their social life.

Try to visualize this situation in Greece. The child grew up, revered a person in his or her early thirties. On reaching the age of twenty-one, the child strongly felt: “Now I have to find someone of my own age.” This resulted in a manifoldness and also an inwardness.

It also gave the social life a certain structure. We must emphasize this point especially today, when this instinctive life is no longer present in human beings, when especially the teachers of adolescents do not know what to do with them. We cannot find answers to this problem because—as I said yesterday—we were not given such ideas and concepts that could affect our feelings to the extent that the instincts we lost during the natural course of evolution could in a more conscious way be revived.

Without our preoccupation with anthroposophical spiritual science, by which such feelings, such refined feelings, can again be stimulated, we would gradually produce even deeper gulfs between the older children and ourselves. All we could then do is to command, to order them, to do this or that. Should we fail in this we could have recourse to the police or some other authority who would then threaten the disobedient. We cannot establish an inner relationship between teachers and students unless—however theoretical this may sound—we stimulate such thoughts in our whole being that can again awaken in us, but now consciously, what the instinctive life used to provide for people in the past.

Because of this difference in world conception, as I told you yesterday, what we are learning today about our world—that the different substances and properties in nature are combinations of some one hundred or so elements—is valid for us only after death, for our corpses in their graves. The chemical and physical interactions concern not the living human being but only the corpse, which disintegrates according to the laws we find in the combinations of these elements.

By contrast we can point to the views held especially by the ancient Greeks, and still by people as late as the fourth century—views that are today dismissed as childish, as I said yesterday. But these views, correctly understood, provided the people with something else: the way they regarded the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water. As I pointed out, they did not regard the four elements as pictures of coarse sense impressions, coarse physical matter; they regarded them qualitatively. Fire contained at the same time the qualities warm and dry; they thought of water as cold and damp. These living concepts that they connected to the elements could then be applied in several ways.

They applied them in the way they thought about their connection to earth, air, fire, and water—in which they saw pictures, quite definite pictures. They could apply them to the way, in the human being, that the etheric body activates the mixing and demixing, synthesis and analysis of matter. They could understand how the etheric body is working in the physical between birth and death. All we can do, by contrast, is to limit our thinking to the processes in our corpses after death, processes in keeping with the physical and chemical laws. The Greeks and their followers, as far as into the fifteenth century, could think of the working of the etheric in the physical body, by developing qualitatively the properties of fire as warm and dry, of water as cold and damp, of earth as cold and dry, and so on.

By applying these four elements to the human being, one works in a far more living, inner way, which enables one to imagine the etheric body’s participation in the physical substances. By imagining this participation as living processes one becomes inwardly much more mobile, more alive, especially if one adds to one’s imagination something else the Greeks still understood in a living way. They imagined the following [a drawing is made].

You see, today we have the surface of the earth, on it the green plants. How do we today imagine the processes taking place in the world of plants? Here, too, our knowledge is limited to the explanations of the chemical analyses and syntheses taking place in the one hundred or so elements. Anything else is denied, or the attempt is made to see it according to the analogy with reciprocal mineral interaction. One would like to see the interaction of chlorophyll, the green color of the plant, with some outer entities during the plant’s growth as a process similar to that taking place in a test tube. This is not actually said in so many words, but this mode of thinking has become widespread. The plants are being studied according to their mineral properties.

The Greeks, on the other hand, even though they did not express it concisely, said: “When a plant grows, the cold and dry qualities of the earth are working from below upward. Once the plant has emerged from the earth, when it grows leaves and blossoms with their beautiful colors, we see all this as the effect of water and air, in the way we imagine their qualities; and permeating all of it is the effect of fire. Everywhere in the environment there is this interaction, this intermingling of warm and dry, cold and damp, warm and damp, and all of it, all this qualitative interweaving and inter-whirling of dry, cold, damp, and warm across the surface of the earth affects the plant life.”

We just have to see this. If we do, and then if we look away from the plants to the human being, to the way the etheric body is active within the human being, we shall there see something that is similar to plant life. When we look at the total life of the plant, we are inwardly stirred and stimulated, let me say, to participate in this life of the plant, in this objective life. The Greeks felt this. Outside, they said, “everything is blossoming, thriving, growing, and ever changing. All this is also working in me.” The activity of the Greek’s own etheric body, imagined in this way, was not beyond experience. The Greek reflected: “I am no stranger to what constitutes the etheric body in me. Certainly, I cannot see it. But by looking at everything that is growing around me, I experience these activities also within me.”

And if such a Greek—not in a present incarnation but as an ancient Greek—were alive today, and if a modern chemist were to tell him: “Your ideas are nonsensical, childish ones. We have left them behind, discovered not four, but some one hundred elements—hydrogen, oxygen, chlorine, bromine, iodine, and so on”—the Greek would have responded by saying: “I have no quarrel with this, there is no harm in it. But it is no more than a specialized, detailed study of my understanding of the cold and dry qualities of the earth. You have not got beyond the knowledge of the cold and dry properties of the earth. You know nothing of water, fire, and air. You haven’t got the faintest idea of what goes on in the world of plants, of the etheric life in yourself. You cannot even speak about the plants, because your knowledge of the elements cannot give you any idea of life, of what is working in the life of plants.”

Try to feel another ring to our words, how they will be living, as soon as we experience within us the greening, growing processes in the world around us, once these processes cease to be incomprehensible to us. And I can assure you that once it has again become a living experience, incorporated into education, this inner nuance permeating our words will not be limited to affecting the soul abstractly but will put color into faces again. It will transform the whole human being, will have a harmonizing effect. The teacher’s words will have a healthy ring to them, will have a different effect, regardless of anything else. All the other theories that tell us what to do, how things ought to be, are basically nothing but plants cultivated in conservatories. Real education must grow naturally. It must be absorbed into our mental images and feelings in the same way that nourishment is absorbed by the processes active in our blood and nerves, thus growing together with us in our organism.

It is essentially the beginning of folly to tell someone what to do. It is as if we were to say to a stove, “You were put into the room, and it is your duty as a stove to warm the room.” A stove is filled with firewood, which is then lit, but education needs a true knowledge of the human being that can then come alive in the whole person, that can reach our feelings and also our will. It is necessary for us to develop such a knowledge.

The Greeks, though, did not limit themselves to the observation of the life in plants. They looked up to the cosmos, where initially they perceived the circling planets—from the moon to Saturn, as they said.

The Greeks observed the stars and felt: “Here on earth, where I am surrounded by the plants, I am permeated by the effects of fire, air, and water. The plants are permeated by fire, air, and water. What I see there also works rhythmically in me. I actually bear the whole year in me. As the processes of dry and damp and of cold and warm harmonize in the greening and decaying plants, so my etheric body works in me. The only difference is the fact that I have in me a whole world, so that what happens outside during the course of a year takes place within me in shorter rhythms.”

The Greeks felt themselves as living beings within the world, felt themselves belonging to the earth beings. But then they said: “As far as the plants are concerned I can see the beginning of the interaction of earth, air, fire, and water. The etheric then extends upward with its effects. It is now met by the cosmos, by the effects of the stars, initially by the effects of the planets, on fire, air, and water. Without the planets, I would have an etheric body, the plants would exist. But I would not, for example, be able to develop the front part of my brain without the forces of Saturn, working from without. I would not have a larynx without the Mars forces, working from without. I would not have a heart without the forces raying in from without.”

These thoughts prompted the further reflection: “Forces are raying in from without. The etheric is raying outward. But the forces that constitute me are raying in from indefinite cosmic distances—forces that are modified through the influence of the planets, forces extending inward from beyond the plant world.” The Greeks felt: “I could not have the front part of my brain, could not have a larynx, heart, or stomach without Saturn, Mars, the sun, or Mercury.” Through their organs, the Greeks felt themselves as much a part of the wide cosmos as they felt themselves part of earth, air, fire, and water in the etheric body. And they saw the cosmic forces whirling through each other in earth, air, fire, and water in a way that allowed the heart, the lungs, and the other organs to develop.

The Greeks felt themselves to be physical products not just of the earth but of the whole cosmos. “Here I am.” they could say, “standing beside a plant. But cosmic forces are active in me. These forces also affect the plants, but merely from without. They cannot enter the plants, cannot produce organs in them. But they penetrate me and produce in me everything I share with the animals. In regard to my organizing the effects of the cosmos, I can reach as far as the zodiac. There I have exhausted the sphere in which I can observe everything that extends into my animal nature and into the animals around me. I see the animals in their characteristic forms—I see a lion, for example. In the lion I can see a definite interaction between the planets and the fixed stars, which allows me to understand why a lion has this particular shape and these particular features. The same applies to the other animals. Learning to understand the nature of the animals around me, I learn to understand the astral body. I also experience the astral body within myself, just as I experience the etheric—what is in the plants—within myself. Together with the animals of the earth, I am not merely a creature of earth but a member of the cosmos, of that which pulsates through the cosmos as a result of the existence of the stars.”

Such a perception of the world can indeed permeate a human being, permeate one’s feelings, so that one may say: “Certainly, I can see objects formed according to mineral laws. But these do not include me. Neither am I a part of the plant world. And I am certainly not part of the animal world. I cannot live on the earth merely through the forces rising from the earth.” Feeling oneself within the whole of the universe essentially constituted the element in which the Greeks used to live, albeit yet instinctively.

The ego was then sought outside the circle of the zodiac, in a sphere that was pure spirit, for which a physical correlate could not be found except in its outer picture, the sun. This is the idea of the sun held by the people of still earlier times; it had become somewhat decadent during the Greek cultural period.

Our physicists and astronomers imagine the sun as a huge gaseous ball some twenty million miles away in the universe. This huge cosmic gas stove—without walls—radiates light and warmth in all directions. It is the only explanation, the sole idea for us—if we wish to be experts and not naive dilettantes. Indeed it is only an “expert,” a “specialist,” who could hold such a view. You will get closer to the truth by imagining the following. Imagine yourself surrounded by light. Light is everywhere. But nowhere is there an object that reflects this light. The light will then not be reflected to you; the light-filled space will be dark. You will not see anything; you will be surrounded by total darkness. Were there nothing but light, we would experience total darkness. Light only returns to us if it is caught by something; otherwise we cannot see it. In a light-filled room is total darkness.

A better age than ours certainly entertained this idea. Its people knew that the sun was not a gigantic gas stove, that there was not merely an empty space up there, but less than space, a negative space. Our physicists would get the surprise of their lives if they were to travel to the sun. They would not find the imagined gas ball, would perceive nothing, not even space, but merely left-out space, an energy or force that absorbs space. This force exists. Space is everywhere. We just have to be able to imagine the “less-than-space.” In the meantime, we at least know that “less-than-no-money” means debts.

Space has its boundaries, and negative space collects the light, which cannot pass through the negative emptiness, but is rayed back. Thus the sun becomes visible. Light is everywhere. What we see as the sun is only an entity that rays back, an apparatus that reflects the light. The origin of this light is, according to the Greeks, beyond the region of the zodiac. The light enters from cosmic distances and not from perceptible space. But it is collected, made visible, through the sun.

This, so the Greeks said, is connected with the development of the ego, whose origin is in regions higher than the planets. The sun is connected with the ego by virtue of the fact that the sun is less than space, emptier than space—at the place of the sun all matter ceases to be and spirituality can enter. It was because the Greeks understood the spiritual nature of the sun that they felt themselves so very much related to it.

Something of this living feeling, of this entering into the spirit by looking up to the cosmos, was still consciously experienced as late as the sixth century, especially during the middle of the fourth century. And because of the living feeling, events were described as resulting from the influence not of the planets but of the hierarchical beings who move what can be outwardly perceived as the planets. This living idea is necessary if we wish to arrive at a different experience of ourselves, imparted into the world as human beings.

If now we take a look at the animal kingdom from this point of view, we may say that this is also within us. It produces our organs. But the animals I see are enclosed in definite forms. I have not become such a form. I do not look like a lion, a bull, an ox, or a pig. I have in me all the animals as synthesis; I have within me the disposition for all of them. If the effect of the sun had not equalized it all, I should be somebody in whom the whole of the animal kingdom were thrown together, whirling, all the animals rooting into each other. It is the effect of the sun that equalizes it, that brings it to a state of balance.

And what is the result of this fact—that I bear within me the dispositions for all the animals, but in a suppressed way? It allows me to think forms, imaginations. The animals are outwardly shaped according to their imaginations; they are living imaginations, move about as imaginations. Looking at the animals I can see the world of imagination. The same forms are in me. They have become thought pictures in me, because I have not assumed their outer shape, have not made them spatial.

If we were to go even further back in time, before Thales, we would find an exact knowledge taught in mystery centers. Plato recorded this knowledge in his esoteric writings. We may describe it as follows. What is logic? Living logic is zoology! What comes to expression in the animal kingdom harmonizes itself in us and, according to our predisposition, assumes a spiritually abstract form, thus producing in us living thought activity. It is the animal kingdom that is active in our life of thoughts. Ergo, logic is zoology.

This knowledge was later replaced by the Socratism of Aristotle, and the consciousness was lost. The beginning of abstract logic came when the living relation of elective affinities gave way to the relation of judgment, the abstract connection of concepts—as we see them expressed in Aristotle’s logic, a logic that can drive the student preoccupied with it to despair, because in it can be found nothing concrete on which to build, nothing to hang on to.

We feel, we think, we develop concepts because we have within us what is spread out, outside of us, in the animal kingdom. If we develop this view, we impart ourselves into the world in a way that is quite different. Will and feelings are then vitalized in a way that is quite different. We feel ourselves related to the nature kingdoms. And we gradually experience not only the etheric but also the astral activity in ourselves.

If we are not limited by the abstract concepts taught everywhere today, but if we are inwardly stimulated by positive forms, and if we are then confronted by the fourteen- and fifteen- year-old children, we learn to observe them. What we inwardly receive will then direct our eyes and ears to the way we ought to conduct the next lesson. Our eyes are led and guided, our ears are led and guided, and only in this way will our observation of what is going on in the fourteen- and fifteen- year old students be stimulated. If we do not have this stimulation, if we do not permeate ourselves with such a spiritual science that enters our life of feelings, we confront these youngsters—as people used to say when I was young—“as the ox confronts Sunday, after having eaten grass all week.”

It is this that we must give our culture, our civilization, our sciences, so that they can become real, and not only a sum total of names, a mere nominalism, so that they can kindle in us something that has meaning and reality. This will allow us to observe human beings. I do not mean that we ought to proceed craftily, recording their behavior in notebooks. No, the positive forms will come to us as though by themselves when we observe in this way. We shall arrive at a judgment of each child, need not speak about it, because it will be mobile within us. We can then raise it to consciousness, and we shall conduct our lessons according to the numerous judgments that live and surge in us, as the whole of the animal kingdom is living in true thought forms.

Just think what it would mean if we had to know everything, if we had to have a clear notion of how the lion is eating a lamb, if we had to be fully conscious of that. By the same token, we cannot judge everything in our environment, cannot raise everything to an explicit consciousness. But it can be there; we can act accordingly. If we have not taken our starting point from the knowledge that only reckons with abstract concepts and abstract natural laws and that cannot possibly raise itself to such positive thought forms, then we can stand among our students and act appropriately. But how can we have anything other than such a starting point if we imagine the big gas stove without walls boiling away in the universe. Such a concept cannot lead to a better understanding of human beings.

All of this must lead to the deep exploration of conscience, to our telling ourselves that unless we make every effort to permeate our life of instincts and feelings with spiritual science, we can no longer understand children in their fourteenth and fifteenth years. We learn to understand them only by progressing to such a knowledge. This is what is meant by our ever emphasizing that anthroposophy is pedagogy. In other words, anthroposophy becomes pedagogy when one gets to the stage at which one can educate. All that is needed is to take from the depths of the soul what has been put into it through anthroposophy, if it is to be applied to education. What I mean to say is that if the qualities present in each human being are given a pedagogical direction, the anthroposophical understanding of the human being will also become a true pedagogy.

Yesterday I said to the teachers of the tenth grade that they should begin with a certain knowledge of the human being. Such a knowledge wishes to make us understand that we ought to place the human being again into the whole universe, according to body, soul, and spirit. We really should—if we are true teachers working on the basis of this knowledge of the human being—study anatomy and physiology, learn everything that has been produced in these fields by centuries of spiritless work. But these books should be no more than sources of information, and we should never omit to pour into them the knowledge we can gain from anthroposophy.

Only this approach will shed light on the information that emerges from such books, on what is generally held to be true today. You must have a different attitude toward this literature than other people. Certainly you will be called arrogant and worse, but you will have to accept this treatment today. You will have to live with it. You will have to see in the offerings of modern science merely the source for information—just as a member of the ancient Greek culture, if such a one were to come to life today and read a book on chemistry, would say: “The things I know about the earth, that it is dry and cold, that it affects plant growth, this you specialize for me. To learn about the details is interesting. But you have no knowledge of the totality of life; you merely know a quarter of it.”

We must return to a knowledge that enters our feelings and will, that permeates our whole being, that is for soul and spirit similar to the blood for the physical. Then becoming different human beings, we shall also become true teachers. The teaching profession cannot tolerate the automatization of the human being, which is the result of the various artificially grown greenhouse plants in educational theories. There are even experiments today that are supposed to lead to new concepts—experiments that show how memory works, how the will and even the thoughts are developing and running their course, harmless games that might even produce results. We need not be against games, those of children or those of the laboratory. What matters, however, is that we oppose the narrowing of the horizon that such experiments produce.